262 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 
time altered from designs by Nash, and plans carried out by 
William Ait on the younger, son of the author of Hortus 
Kewensis, the royal gardener at Kensington and Kew. The 
ground round Old Buckingham House must have been a 
charming specimen of a garden of Queen Anne's time. There 
were wide terraces, the walls of which were covered with roses 
and jessamine, parterres, “ waterworks," and fountains, a 
canal 600 yards long, with a double row of limes on either side, 
also greenhouses, kitchen-garden, and a wilderness. George IV. 
had the whole of these swept away, and plain grass, a stiff 
artificial lake, with bays and promontories, and a few clumps 
of trees substituted. Some contemporary views show how 
bare and conventional the renovated landscape then appeared. 
Davis was another landscape gardener of this school, said by 
his contemporaries to have “ displayed considerable taste," 
especially in the alterations he carried out at Longleat. Two 
views of Narford, 1 with an interval of 170 years between 
them, taken from as nearly as possible the same point of 
view, show how complete the change from a formal to a land¬ 
scape garden can be. The first of the cascade pond was sketched 
about 1720 by Edmond Prideaux, of Prideaux in Cornwall, 
when on a tour in Norfolk. The second is from a photograph 
taken in 1894. The lake, which covers 70 acres, was made about 
1842, and all traces of the stiff pond have vanished. Thus, in all 
parts of England, one after another, the old gardens disappeared. 
By the end of the eighteenth century landscape gardening had 
become the recognized national style of England, and it was 
copied on the Continent, in France, Italy, and Germany. 
“ English gardens" became the fashion, and books were 
written abroad to extol the English taste, and invite other 
nations to copy it, 2 and old gardens were destroyed to give 
place to the new style. But on the Continent one thing was 
lacking which was the redeeming point in all these landscapes, 
and that was the green turf. Nowhere is the grass so fair and 
green as in England, and landscape-gardeners appreciated this 
great advantage. 
1 Property of Mrs. Fountaine. 
2 Collections des Jar dins Anglois. Le Rouge, Paris, 1776. BeV Arte 
dei Giardini Inglesi, Milan, 1801. Plan de Ja,rdins dans le Gout 
Anglais . J. L. Mansa, Copenhagen, 1798, etc. 
