Formal Gardening 



ders, which limits him to creations that are 

 all alike, either in idea or in effect. The 

 hill-side garden of Italy, with its terraces and 

 balustrades, stairways, grottos, and statues, 

 and its rich masses of freely growing foli- 

 age, contrasting harmoniously with these ar- 

 tificial features, is formal, architectonic, in 

 aim and aspect. Formal is the vast level 

 park at Versailles, with its magnificent 

 straight alleys of trees, its big rectangular 

 basins of water, its stately fountains and 

 wide gravelled spaces — splendid outdoor 

 drawing-room that it was for a pompous 

 king and his courtiers. But formal, too, is 

 the park at Dijon which also Le Notre de- 

 signed, where a straight avenue runs through 

 the centre, and narrower ones radiate from 

 it to the drive which encircles the boundary, 

 but where the whole of the remaining space 

 is a free-growing forest, traversed by wind- 

 ing footways of turf. The old Dutch gar- 

 den was formal, with its trees and shrubs 

 clipped into fantastic shapes, and its puerile, 

 toy-like ornamentation ; but so also was the 

 great walled garden of old English days, 

 symmetrically arranged and partly planted 



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