The Italian Formal Garden 
“the SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE PLAN OF THE GARDENS” 
General View of Avenue Caserta 
length of the grounds and to the vast size of the palace. It 
is a royal park, not a private citizen’s garden. 
Fourthly, the treatment of the trees and grass is also char¬ 
acteristic of the Italian gardens. The American and English 
styles of park gardening, with broadly-sloping lawns sprinkled 
over with clumps of shrubbery and groups of trees, in a stud¬ 
iedly accidental and picturesque arrangement, with winding 
walks and drives giving the sense of distance and ever-chang¬ 
ing prospect, is not practised in the villa gardens, because 
it represents a wholly different conception of purpose and 
function from that which created them. Occasionally, as in 
parts of the Borghese grounds, one finds broad meadows, 
sloping lawns, and a natural or artificial wild-wood, but it is in 
most cases sharply distinguished from the formal part of the 
grounds, in which there is no mixing of the two sorts of 
gardening. 
Trees are used chiefly in two ways—first on the upper ter¬ 
race and around the outskirts of the formal garden, to serve as 
a picturesque background silhouetted with its stone pines and 
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