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 
