GARDEN DESIGN— COMPARATIVE, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL. 381 



presents to Cyrus from the cities of Greece, that were his confederates, he 

 received him with the greatest humanity, and amongst other things 

 showed him his garden, which was called ' The Paradise of Sardis ' ; which 

 when Lysander beheld he was struck with admiration of the beauty of the 

 trees, the regularity of their planting, the evenness of their rows, and 

 their making regular angles one to another ; or, in a word, the beauty of 

 the quincunx order in which they were planted, and the delightful odours 

 which issued from them. Lysander could no longer refrain from extolling 

 the beauty of their order, but more particularly admired the excellent skill 

 of the hand that had so curiously disposed them ; which Cyrus perceiving, 

 answered him : 1 All the trees which you behold here are of my own 

 appointment ; I it was that contrived, measured, laid out the ground for 

 planting these trees, and I can even show you some of them that I planted 

 with my own hands.' " 



Space forbids my dilating further upon the use and misuse of trees 

 and how they should dominate. I hope to deal with this in the next 

 lecture on the practice of garden design, but this quotation is introduced 

 to prove my contention that Cyrus forced his trees. 



I fear I have not left myself much time to devote to the ancient 

 Roman gardens, regarding which we have much data and information, 

 so much that to do any measure of justice to them would need a separate 

 lecture. 



It is difficult to define in a few sentences wherein the Romans 

 differed from the Greeks in their civilization, their arts, their ideals, and 

 wherein their deterioration can be seen, yet here it is that we ought to 

 start to get a just estimate of their gardens. It may be disputed by some, 

 but it must be always borne in mind that the chief factor you have to 

 deal with in ancient gardenage is the religious element ; and, moreover, 

 I do not limit or confine the motive for the ancient gardens alone to 

 religious pervasion, it certainly was a great motive in medieval gardens, 

 and not alone gardens but domestic architecture also. What a number 

 — I might almost say the majority of superb survivals of medieval 

 gardens in this country — have the church or cathedral as neighbour, and 

 often only the church wall as a dividing line ; sometimes the garden 

 is the cathedral close itself. Added to this evidence, to prove the 

 preponderating permeation of the religious, we find numbers of old farms 

 and mansions built in the Gothic style with or without chapels. If 

 further evidence were needed as to the symbolic meaning conveyed by 

 garden arrangements and forms, and how these religious sentiments have 

 become national, I could clinch it by a reference to the Japanese and in 

 lesser degree to the Chinese. 



If I was asked to define briefly wherein the Roman imitation declined 

 from their Greek ideal, I would say that, instead of maintaining a national 

 ideal, which they reckoned to have, and which in time of national 

 catastrophe they were in a measure true to, when we read of them flocking 

 to their national temples and prostrating themselves and imploring victory, 

 instead of the national they fell into individualism to their own household 

 gods and goddesses. This decadence was fostered, no doubt, by the 

 always divided interests of the patricians or nobles and the plebeians or 

 common people. Their national system was gradually replaced by a 



