FLORENTINE VILLAS 
fashions imported from England and France; and the 
English who have colonized in such numbers the slopes 
above the Arno have contributed not a little to the 
destruction of the old gardens by introducing into their 
horticultural plans two features entirely alien to the 
Tuscan climate and soil, namely, lawns and deciduous 
shade-trees. 
Many indeed are the parterres and terraces which 
have disappeared before the Britannic craving for a 
lawn, many the olive-orchards and vineyards which 
must have given way to the thinly dotted “specimen 
trees ” so dear to the English landscape-gardener, who 
is still, with rare exceptions, the slave of his famous 
eighteenth-century predecessors, Repton and “ Capa- 
bility Brown,” as the English architect is still the de- 
scendant of Pugin and the Gothic revival This 
Anglicization of the Tuscan garden did not, of course, 
come only from direct English influence. The jardin 
anglais was fashionable in France when Marie Antoi- 
nette laid out the Petit Trianon, and Herr Tuckermann, 
in his book on Italian gardens, propounds a theory, for 
which he gives no very clear reasons, to the effect that 
the naturalistic school of gardening actually originated 
in Italy, in the Borghese gardens in Rome, which he 
supposes to have been laid out more or less in their 
present form by Giovanni Fontana, as early as the first 
quarter of the seventeenth century. 
It is certain, at any rate, that the Florentines adopted 
