,o FORMAL GARDENS IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 
skill in designing elaborate parterres and conventional scrolls, often to be plotted out in coloured sands 
and box edgings. , , 
Happily during the last few years a revival of the Formal Garden has taken place, and as throughout the 
Renaissance period architects may be said to have planned the setting out of the gardens surrounding the 
houses they designed, so it is gratifying to see that those of our own day have awakened to the fact that 
this work is quite within their province, and that a much more pleasing and harmonious result is likely to 
be attained when the main lines are laid out by those who have designed and watched the building glow 
than when left to the practical gardener alone. 
In Scotland gardening like all the other arts was greatly retarded during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
through the poverty and unrest of the country. Mary and her French courtiers had indeed given an impetus 
to garden design, but it was not until the seventeenth century that the best gardens were laid out. These coul 
hardly rival the English, on account of the soil and climate of Scotland, but they are often very quaint and 
picturesque, as, for example, is that at Barncluith in Lanarkshire, laid out in a series of terraces overhanging 
the River Evan. The scale of these gardens is usually small; gigantic schemes such as were carried out in 
England having rarely been attempted. Although, of course, there were originally far fewer gardens m 
Scotland than in the more southern isle, a greater proportion of these seem to have survived, more or less 
unaltered, to our own times. 
