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JOUBNAL OE THE EOYAL HOKTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 



It may be maintained with truth that, in some instances, as in the 

 Luxembourg gardens and those of the Tuileries and Versailles, where is 

 expressed the French interpretation of Renaissance garden design, that it 

 is too heavy and too stately for the ordinary mortal. These examples are, 

 perhaps, scarcely representative of the style, although illustrative of it. 

 They are schemes too vast to comprehend, yet no one can help but be 

 impressed with the spacious attempts to achieve the classic and the 

 grandeur of their vistas, but they are not an epitome of the rich and 

 varied treasure-house of design over which is inscribed the inspiring 

 word " Renaissance." 



The Renaissance school of design is usually associated in the minds 

 of many who are partially educated with those formal bird's-eye views 

 such as are to be seen in old sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth 

 century books, with everything blocked in geometrically square : courts, 

 circles, and radiating avenues of trees, and usually with one half of the 

 mansion almost, if not exactly, balancing the other half. 



The grandiose schemes of the French Renaissance gardeners and 

 designers, such as Pierre Lescot, Jean Bullant, and Le Notre, and their 

 gardens and mansions, have never found much favour in England. In 

 order to portray the English ideal and the French ideal side by side we 

 might make the comparison between Windsor Castle with all its picturesque 

 disarray of battlements and towers and Versailles with all its ordered 

 symmetry. The former expresses what is popular in England, and the 

 latter is expressive of the phase of art which is nationally the admiration 

 of the French. Whatever we may be inclined to think of the French 

 Renaissance we cannot but admire their logical and spacious planning, 

 and this is where I find most amateurs who set about laying out their 

 gardens on the freer or landscape style nearly always get stranded. 



They do piece after piece and do them well, but somehow they find 

 that after they have done one or two portions the former portion will 

 not line up with the later contemplated pieces. Consequently, they have 

 to begin pulling back, replanting, and altering, or perhaps have to call 

 in some one to give them a comprehensive scheme in plan. For my part 

 I can admire and wonder at these vast conceptions of the Frenchmen, and 

 if a man is going to be an all-round garden designer, or an all-round garden 

 admirer for that matter, he must quietly imbibe the spirit which compassed 

 their conception, although he may never be called upon to do anything 

 approaching their scale or vastness. 



The designs of Androuet du Cerceau, 1510-1575, the most scholarly 

 of the French draughtsmen, and one of the best designers of this school, 

 do not please universally on account of their nakedness and as some 

 would say their stiffness. But as everyone knows, or ought to know, they 

 were not intended to appear unclothed with verdure ; it is for the eye and 

 mind of the artist to clothe the skeleton view in imagination. 



I would like to make a little divergence at this point, to beg indul- 

 gence and toleration for designs of this kind, although they may appear at 

 first sight obsolete to a modern mind, and for much that may be classed 

 with them for the same reason, such as the seemingly stiff representations 

 of rocks and trees on many or most of the old masters' paintings. The 

 ancients were schooled in what it takes most moderns half a lifetime to 



