THE HOUSE THAT WAS BUILT 

 FOR A GARDEN 



ARTHUR W. COLTON 



EDITORIAL FOREWORD 



HOME BUILDING is no longer merely a matter of mortar and shingles; nowadays we build with living 

 flowers and trees as well — witness the steadily growing group of landscape architects. 

 Past the pioneer period where shelter was the sole consideration, and having mercifully survived the ter- 

 rible years when architecture lost its early innocence and awakened to a crude and blatant self-consciousness 

 that struggled for expression in "ginger-bread" ornament and innumerable angles, we have emerged into more 

 gracious days with the leisure and the learning to look about and determine what sort of homes we really want, and why. 



Nowadays a house is not arbitrarily set down anywhere on a plot of land and then followed by a query as to where the garden shall go. Quite 

 the contrary — the particular piece of ground in question is first carefully studied. 



For it is the land, its character and spirit, that determines what the house shall be. When this fundamental principle is disregarded we at 

 once sense the "something wrong." Grievous to see are great residences perched bleakly in unsuitable environment with no appearance of be- 

 longing, with a futile air of having been temporarily set down upon the earth rather than of being there comfortably at ease and at one with it. 



A dwelling may be made or marred by its approach, by the massing of woodland or shrubbery on this side or that, by the disposition of flower- 

 beds and borders, all of which must, for harmony of finished effect, be included in the original plan. 



Because garden and house are so inevitably linked, so essentially interdependent, we believe that gardeners everywhere will find much to 

 interest and inspire in this series of articles, especially prepared for us by Mr. Colton, which presents some happy solutions achieved by Americans 

 of skill and imagination East and West. (The first article of the series may be found in The Garden Magazine for December, 192 1, on pages 

 187, 188, 189.) 



II. CHARLES A. PLAITS ADAPTATION OF ITALIAN STYLE TO AMERICAN SPIRIT 



\T IS, of course, a different matter to see gardens with 

 the eye of an architect and to see gardens with the eye 

 of a lover of leaves and flowers. The Italian of the 

 Renaissance was an artist, but not a nature lover, 

 whereas Americans have an instinctive love of nature more 

 commonly than an instinctive love of art. 



We inherit a tradition of English taste for English landscape 

 gardening, which is informal; we come later to see that there was 

 reason and beauty in the old Italian's architectural gardening; 

 and behind these, behind us all, lies the great fact of our own 

 countryside, which is neither English nor Italian, but like neither 

 and like both. We are immigrant peoples importing divergent 

 cultures into a new continent. This northeastern part of the 

 country was not long ago buried in forest, mainly deciduous, and 

 it is still, relatively, a wooded land. Our tastes are sprung from 

 these elements, and whatever beauty we may succeed in creat- 

 ing about us must be based on these tastes. 



Personally, I was, thirty years ago, an apparently incurable 

 romanticist, with the same pronounced dislike for Versailles as 

 for Pope and Boileau, and possessed of the feeling that "the 

 return to nature" was simply the escape from a dull prison into 

 beauty and reality. But in the course of those years the feeling 

 has lost some of its edge. It has had to listen to other feelings; 

 to an unexpected and extraordinary pleasure, for instance, ex- 

 perienced in the stately avenues of St. Cloud, to a vague but 

 growing and impatient discontent with the whole "native" 

 school of landscape. When one has got so far as invariably to 

 emerge from Central Park with the feeling that the fear of a 

 straight line is the beginning of nonsense, he is no longer an 

 incurable romanticist. 



Mr. Piatt has seen all these things earlier and more clearly 

 than most of us, and has formed delicate solutions for problems 

 that we were beginning to be obscurely aware of. A garden is, 

 among other things, an intermediary. It has relations to the 

 house on the one side, and on the other to the country around it. 

 It is, in that sense, the centre of an aesthetic complex. It is 

 dedicated to happiness, or at least to content, and the growth 

 of garden making in this country is the entry upon a long vista 

 of more beautiful, more fragrant living for myriads of people 

 in generations to come. 



THAT Renaissance architects had planned the gardens of 

 country palaces not only for show but for comfort is a dis- 

 covery made and recorded by Mr. Charles A. Piatt in his book 



on Italian gardens. "Discovery" in this sense does not mean 

 that it never had been noticed before. It may have been, or 

 may not. Columbus discovered America, whatever Eric the 

 Norseman may have done. It is a relative question of realizing 

 a fact and bringing it home to use. 



With trained and observant eyes Mr. Piatt noted in this or 

 that garden the utility of design rather than the monumental 

 grandeur — "the shrewdness with which the architect had taken 

 advantage of every peculiarity to give the princely dweller on 

 some great hillside not only the things he wanted for show but 

 the things he needed for comfort — the intimate character imply- 

 ing quiet hours in the shade, easy access to the house, convenient 

 walks, and all the resources requisite to a happy human life." 

 He saw that the garden of the Villa Lante, for example, " though 

 merely as a spectacle, one of the most entrancing in all Italy," is 

 yet made for domesticity; and, though framed on stately lines, 

 is a home, set amid flowers and sunshine, with fountains spark- 

 ling and murmuring, and pavilions between its basin and grove 

 of towering Oaks. 



It was a discovery that has wide analogies. Old architectures, 

 like historical men and times, become spectacles to be looked at 

 — monumental, romantic, strange and dim with time — which in 

 their day were no such matter. The "princely dweller on 

 some great hillside" for all his stately marbles, cared more pro- 

 foundly for happiness than splendor, cared in his own way for 

 comfort and convenience, and to him cool shade and running 

 water and children playing among the flowers were pleasant, 

 as to us. He liked the quiet talk of friends by sunset and twi- 

 light in the garden. We understand the men of the past better, 

 and the records they left behind them, if we do not forget that 

 normally every one of them every day sat down to his meals, and 

 every night took off his clothes and went to bed. 



BRINGING back from Italy, some thirty years ago, the idea 

 that a Renaissance villa was something to be lived in as 

 well as something to be looked at, Mr. Piatt brought with it the 

 problem of how to adjust the old Italian ideal, the villa and its 

 gardens, to the modern American home. 



At that time (the early 90's) the building of great country 

 houses in large numbers, was just beginning. Such houses had 

 not been common except at places like Newport; or in the neigh- 

 borhood of a few large cities; or here and there in the South, the 

 relics of a day that was dead. But wealthy people everywhere 

 were beginning to look to the country for homes instead of only 



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