House and Garden 
VoL. XIII FEBRUARY, 1908 No. 2 
Interesting Formal Gardens 
By MARY H. NORTHEND 
NE of the clearest joys of life is that of 
i 1 anticipation. If, like me, you love to look 
forward to things, my friend, then culti¬ 
vate a garden; for a garden is all expectation.” So 
said the late Joseph Jefferson; and the words will find 
an echo, the world over, in the hearts of those who 
love Nature in all her moods and tenses, and who, at 
the call of spring, feel that ancient, primeval impulse 
to get down next to the ground, and to make things 
grow. Gardening is a very old, as well as a very 
beautiful, form of the creative instinct. 
Surely, there can be no purer passion than a love 
for flowers; and since it is well-nigh universal, we 
can but rejoice that it is so easily gratified. The 
poorest little plat of ground will produce a wealth of 
nasturtiums that is fairly dazzling in brilliance and 
variety; and the cramped dweller in a flat can grow 
Boston ferns or scarlet geraniums in a window-box, 
whether it has shade or sun. 
When we are free to consider the subject of flower 
culture in its highest aspect, we must agree that our 
most elaborate development of the art Is found in the 
formal garden. This feature has come down to us 
from antiquity; as the modern Italian garden is but 
the direct lineal descendant of the Roman villa, where 
peacocks walked the terraces and goldfish disported 
themselves in the fountains, while among the taste¬ 
fully grouped shrubbery, the finest sculptors had em¬ 
balmed In deathless marble the flight of Daphne or the 
death struggles of Antaeus, crushed by Hercules. 
Returning crusaders brought to Holland, along 
with tulips, hyacinths, and various other bulbs from 
the Holy Land, the theory of the Italian garden, as 
seen and admired by Dutch crusaders in the seaports 
of Italy. A hint was enough for these flower-loving 
people. Thorough and practical in all their habits, 
they soon caused their sandy, alluvial soil to produce 
bulbs of a quality hitherto unknown to floriculture; 
and the theory of the Italian garden was soon adapted 
to the requirements of Holland, forming the basis of 
the Dutch garden of the present day. 
The Italian Renaissance brought the formal garden 
Into England, about the middle of the fifteenth cen¬ 
tury. Modifications of this model resulted in the 
English tea-gardens, which served as a pattern for 
our Colonial ancestors, when New England was being 
settled, and gardens were being coaxed into bloom 
amid virgin forest and meadow. 
Perhaps because of its comparative age, bistoric 
Salem has many of these gardens which were laid out 
by the earliest settlers, and planted carefully with root 
and seed that had been brought, by dint of infinite 
pains and hardship, across the stormy seas to the 
unknown land. How many a cutting must have been 
a sad memorial of happier days in light-hearted 
youth, before the period of exile! This tree, perhaps, 
had bent above a father’s grave, that shrub had grown 
beside the gate, and the vine had draped the arbor 
where friends now dead, or widely scattered, had 
been wont to meet. 
With many a sad misgiving, as well as with many a 
loving remembrance, these old-time gardens must 
have been begun. They are all similar in outline, 
and present the same characteristic features. There 
is usually an old-fashioned arbor, deep buried in wis¬ 
taria or Virginia creeper, and this arbor is located in 
the center, or at the end farthest from the house, and 
is reached by the straightest of well-kept paths, brick- 
paved or gravel-strewn, but always bordered with 
box. The flower-bed, containing violets or peonies 
or larkspur or foxglove, are usually bordered with 
the same quaint evergreen, closely clipped and 
flourishing. The eff ect of odor upon the memory is 
odd and inexplicable. The smell of wet box has 
power to bring a Salem garden before my eyes at any 
moment, although I have found similar enclosures 
in Portsmouth, in New Haven, and in several early 
New England towns. 
The Chestnut Street homes have descended from 
father to son, keeping inviolate the old traditions and 
the Colonial gardens. Their quaint and appealing 
loveliness has exerted its influence upon the hand¬ 
some grounds all along the North Shore, and many 
a fine formal garden has kept the touch of simplicity 
in the prim, box-bordered path. Our earliest Im¬ 
pressions of beauty are those which persist longest, 
and our childish memory of “grandmother’s gar¬ 
den” insensibly affects the ideals of our after life. 
Our first thought is that formal gardens must of 
necessity show great and depressing similarity. 
Copyriylit, 1908, hy The John G. Winston Co. 
41 
