The Right Place for the Garden Arch 
THERE IS A CHARM THAT OLD-FASHIONED GARDENS OBTAINED FROM THE PROPER 
USE OF ARCHES AND ARBORS—PRESENT DAY POSSIBILITIES TO GET BEST RESULTS 
BY Grace Tabor 
Photographs by the Author and others 
O UR gardens generally seem 
curiously lacking in that 
charming structure, the garden 
arch — especially recently-made gar¬ 
dens. Just why this is so I have 
never been able to make up my 
mind : they were frequent enough 
in old gardens, and their beauty is 
self-evident. Why do we have so 
few now ? Can it be a part of the 
general self-consciousness that has 
pervaded building of every kind 
among us, for the last forty years 
or so ? Having no “practical pur¬ 
pose"^ — unless used as a grape trel¬ 
lis — an arch gives its builder pos¬ 
sibly a guilty sense of folly, when 
someone demands in an unsympa¬ 
thetic tone, “What's that thing 
for?" For it is an exceedingly 
difficult matter to explain to the 
man who will put such a query, 
what it is for. It takes imagina¬ 
tion to want an arch, imagination 
to build it, and imagination to en¬ 
joy it—and imagination eludes ex¬ 
planations. 
Of course an arch may, through 
being unhappily placed in the gar¬ 
den. fail absolutely in its purpose 
of interesting and pleasing, but 
this is the fault of the gardener's 
judgment, and not in the least an 
argument against the structure in itself. It is only an argument 
against thrusting it down haphazard — which means that it is an 
argument in favor of the carefully thought out general plan which 
we can never successfully do without. 
There seems at first glance very little reason for the use of 
The approach to this arch is excellent, but the view through and 
beyond it is lacking in attractiveness 
isolated arches anywhere, for pri¬ 
marily it appears that an arch 
should afford support for some¬ 
thing. But the custom that has 
prevailed from time immemorial of 
erecting arches of triumph, gives 
a precedent—wide though it seems 
from the mark—for an arch that 
is not a support, provided that it 
is beautiful in itself, and that it is 
set in right relation in the garden 
plan. Therefore, without going 
into its significance as an isolated 
structure, nor attempting an analy¬ 
sis of its value or of its influence 
as an object of frequent considera¬ 
tion. we may say that it is then its 
own excuse for being—which is 
excuse enough. So we are brought 
to the question of what positions 
an arch may occupy in the garden 
—or in the grounds. 
The first proposition which ap¬ 
peals to me as a sound basis for a 
beginning is a negative—or at least 
is expressed in a negative. An 
arch should never stand between 
two similar spots or two spots sim¬ 
ilarly treated, such as at the cen¬ 
tre of a garden, for instance. The 
positive end of this statement is 
that an arch should always lead 
into, or out from, some distinctive 
portion of the garden, with either a diminishing or a widening 
prospect beyond it—never sameness. 
In the garden shown in the upper illustration on this page, the 
wooden arch in the foreground leads to a walk that is obviously 
the entrance into a distinctively set apart rectangle—a cunningly 
A succession of arches should serve to connect sections of the garden 
which have different characteristics 
The arch should always lead to or from some distinctive 
portion of the garden, with a suggestive prospect beyond 
(20) 
