322 
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The Garden Magazine, July, 1921 jfi 
Contour, walls and angles create as many variations as there 
are owners of homes. Only in a most general way may prin- 
ciples and details be interpreted for Americans. Amongst the 
notable French shrubberies are the European Laurel and glori- 
ous Camellias, which do not withstand the rigors of our Northern 
winters. But almost as numerous are the Rhododendrons, 
Cedars and smaller Conifers; the Holly, plain and variegated; 
the Privets and Lilacs, all of which may be similarly utilized in 
our Northern states. 
T O THE Lrance of the Lifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 
came wealth and internal security. It was no longer 
needful to make one’s home a fortress. Weary of looking down 
upon interior courtyards, the great lords pierced their towers 
and the curtain walls of their battlements for windows, adorned 
them with architectural sculpture and extended their view to 
formal gardens beyond; even when, as was not infrequently 
the case, they retained their ancient moats and drawbridges. 
Others preserved the old citadels, with their contracted terrace 
gardens, but extended the dwellings by building new structures 
around them better suited to days of peace and looking down 
upon the adjacent valleys. 
It was logical and perhaps inevitable that in the years to 
come the dwellers in Lrench chateaux should develop the 
surrounding acres as pretentious parks. With the extra- 
vagance of the day, the great Lrench gardeners, from whom 
Lenotre emerged as the prevailing genius, turned (as did Inigo 
Broun Bios.. Photo. 
THE CASTLE GARDEN AT LOCHES 
The gardens of the old chateaux were sometimes little 
more than a terrace on a cliff or between the battlements, 
where a chatelaine might linger among her Rose-trees 
Jones and Sir Christopher Wren in England) to the Italian 
gardens for principles of elevation, vista, water ornament, and 
architectural detail. 
These were the days when Versailles was transformed from 
a hunting lodge into a glorious world palace. The parks of 
chateau and manor house became complex arrangements of en- 
closed garden, orangery, bowling green, belvedere, fountain, 
cascade, pool, and grotto. Avenues were cut through the 
forests, in straight lines or traverse vistas. Other avenues of 
turf, and canals — with rows of trees cunningly trimmed and 
arranged in a false perspective, or defined by woodlands — 
reached to the horizon. Images of heathen gods disported on 
lawn and balustrade or in forest glen; monumental terraces 
supported wide stretches of lawn; classic architectural ornament 
illuminated secluded alleys, amongst trimly clipped hedges. 
Very little of this need concern the American with a modest 
garden. To landscape architects may be surrendered the 
entangling details, for with them in any case would rest similar 
designs in this country. The fashion has survived only to a 
limited degree in the smaller gardens of France. That it should 
be widely imitated at first was inevitable. The mode of le 
Grand Monarque was a thing to be emulated by Monsieur le 
Marquis, by LeBlanc, the Lyonnais weaver of silks; Rebaud, the ^ 
rich vintner of Champagne; and Beranger, the master of many 1 
ships at Bordeaux. But from the clutter of details have emerged 
only a few admirable details of present-day interest for Ameri- 
cans. 
The forests of France, England, and America, have this in 
common, that they are firmly established in the affection of their 
peoples, who will never willingly abandon them. The America 
that our grandfathers knew and the France and England of the 
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries were all lands of extensive 
forests, where the hunting of fox, deer, and boar supplied popular 
sport. Old World forests may have been contracted and human- 
ized and their wild creatures relegated largely to the pages of 
romance, but the park and game preserve have survived as 
essentials in changing garden fashions. Herein is found a point 
of divergence from the rules for formal gardens in Italy, a 
primal secret of French chateaux and English manors and one 
of their most precious lessons for American gardeners. With 
the Frenchman’s keener sense of proportion and grandeur, the 
principles of forest vista and ornament have reached in his 
country a stage of development more finished and lucid than 
with the other nations. 
As a ruling factor appears the theory of the formal axial vista. 
It presupposes the existence of woodlands through which may 
be cut straight avenues with carpets of turf radiating from a 
dwelling or from centres arbitrarily fixed. One wonders if 
Lenotre and his disciples did not gain inspiration for these 
majestic avenues while journeying along the Roman roads of 
France, which extend for miles over knoll and dale without per- 
ceptible deviations from straight lines. Certainly in their 
application of the idea they reflected genius of a high order. Its 
supreme expressions at Versailles and in the unbroken view 
from the Louvre across the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la 
Concorde and up the Champs-Elysees are dreams of regal 
stateliness realized with consummate art. 
THE ROYAL LODGE AT CHI NON 
Jeanne of Domremy, riding into Chinon to offer herself to her sov- 
ereign and to France, found in the castle yard not the thicket of 
Lilac and Locust there to-day but a formal, yea-and-nay garden 
Here again, the fashion of princes, simplified and adapted 
to the modest chateau, conveys a significant word to Americans. 
The larger chateaux are linked to the neighboring highways 
with vistas of turf, wide and straight and bordered with trees 
and terminating at the road in a grill or terrace, more or less 
monumental. Amongst scores of examples, varying from a 
mere circle of lawn to an impressive avenue of approach, com- 
prising a straight driveway edged with strips of lawn, clipped 
