252 



The Garden Magazine, January, 1922 



WHERE OLD THEMES FURNISH INSPIRATION FOR PRESENT-DAY DESIGN 



Reminiscent of the classic gardens of Europe in its architectural restraint, yet unmistakably both American and 

 modern in spirit, this garden at "Timberline," Bryn Mawr, is one of Mr. Charles A. Piatt's distinctly successful 

 adaptations, or perhaps more truly interpretations of Italian ideals in terms applicable to present-day living 



for holiday resorts. The last twenty-five years has been a great 

 era of country house building. 



In a goodly proportion of these houses the influence of the 

 Italian villa has been plain enough. In the houses designed by 

 Mr. Piatt the influence is quite apparent in some, and rather 

 remote in others; less dominant on the whole than with many 

 other and later architects. His temperament and taste are too 

 American, too much of New England, to be very Italian. There 

 is in his work a certain fine austerity or reserve — call it a sense 

 of fitness in relation to American landscape — which transmutes 

 Italian into American values. 



For whether one likes it or does not, there is a moulding and 

 qualifying something in our American environment, climate, and 

 countryside; and into its likeness we ourselves in some sense 

 grow. Returning from Europe to "these United States" — or 

 at any rate to the northeastern quarter of them — the traveler 

 notices that the air seems keener and clearer, the sky paler, and 

 the clouds more delicate. One is in a mood to prophesy litera- 

 ture gorgeous, ornate, sumptuous, sensuous or passionate, or 



profoundly melancholy. It is a country where men would 

 "think clear" before they "feel deep." Hence probably it 

 would begin with good taste rather than with chaotic power; it 

 would be a finely civilized country before it sounded the deep 

 places of humanity and attained those darker moods, those more 

 subtle and profound emotions, that underlie the great creative 

 ages of the Old World. One goes on to notice that where the 

 population is native for many generations, the men seem more 

 lean and sinewy, less solid and robust, the women more slender, 

 the complexion of both less florid and perhaps a shade darker, 

 than the men and women of those northern European lands 

 from which their ancestors came. 



IT IS a country which has had so far only one notable era of 

 creative art, the literature of New England and its neighbors 

 in the second and third quarters of the last century, and this 

 literature was for the most part more intellectually than tem- 

 peramentally striking. It gave out more light than heat. It 

 never blazed red, was never grim, or sardonic, or tragic. It was 



