262 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



time altered from designs by Nash, and plans carried out by 

 William Aiton the younger, son of the author of Hortus 

 Kewensis, the royal gardener at Kensington and Kew. The 

 ground round Old Buckingham House must have been a 

 charming specimen of a garden of Queen Anne's time. There 

 were wide terraces, the walls of which were covered with roses 

 and jessamine, parterres, " waterworks," and fountains, a 

 canal 600 yards long, with a double row of limes on either side, 

 also greenhouses, kitchen-garden, and a wilderness. George IV. 

 had the whole of these swept away, and plain grass, a stiff 

 artificial lake, with bays and promontories, and a few clumps 

 of trees substituted. Some contemporary views show how 

 bare and conventional the renovated landscape then appeared. 

 Davis was another landscape gardener of this school, said by 

 his contemporaries to have " displayed considerable taste," 

 especially in the alterations he carried out at Longleat. Two 

 views of Narford, 1 with an interval of 170 years between 

 them, taken from as nearly as possible the same point of 

 view, show how complete the change from a formal to a land- 

 scape garden can be. The first of the cascade pond was sketched 

 about 1720 by Edmond Prideaux, of Prideaux in Cornwall, 

 when on a tour in Norfolk. The second is from a photograph 

 taken in 1894. The lake, which covers 70 acres, was made about 

 1842, and all traces of the stiff pond have vanished. Thus, in all 

 parts of England, one after another, the old gardens disappeared. 

 By the end of the eighteenth century landscape gardening had 

 become the recognized national style of England, and it was 

 copied on the Continent, in France, Italy, and Germany. 

 " English gardens " became the fashion, and books were 

 written abroad to extol the English taste, and invite other 

 nations to copy it, 2 and old gardens were destroyed to give 

 place to the new style. But on the Continent one thing was 

 lacking which was the redeeming point in all these landscapes, 

 and that was the green turf. Nowhere is the grass so fair and 

 green as in England, and landscape-gardeners appreciated this 

 great advantage. 



1 Property of Mrs. Fountaine. 



2 Collections des Jardins Anglois. Le Rouge, Paris, 1776. Del' Arte 

 dei Giardini Inglesi, Milan, 1801. Plan de Jardins dans le Gout 

 Anglais. J. L. Mansa, Copenhagen, 1798, etc. 



