58 
House & Garden 
The pool and path 
on the estate of 
W. H. Clarke, at 
Stockbridge, Mass., 
are typical of ro¬ 
mantic gardening 
Made by hand and 
■yet natural is this 
lily pond, shown 
below, on Francis 
E. Drury’s place at 
Cleveland, Ohio 
Another pool-side 
planting is found 
on the place of L. 
Vincent Lockwood, 
Esq., at Riverside, 
Conn. 
ROMANTIC 
GARDENING 
Democracy Expressed in 
Natural Effects 
HANNA TACHAU 
Illustrations by courtesy of Vitale, Brinkerhoff & Geiffert, 
Landscape Architects 
T o live at least a part of the year in the 
country has become the dream of almost 
everyone, and the time is now ripe for putting 
our ideals of landscape gardening into tangible 
fonn to suit this dream. 
Unlike the old days when social conditions 
demanded large, formal houses and gardens 
for ceremonious entertaining, we of a demo¬ 
cratic age are free to choose our own mode of 
living and we must plan and build our gar¬ 
dens to fit our particular requirements. Here 
in America especially, where wealth and cul¬ 
ture are more evenly distributed than in many 
other countries, we are given the opportunity 
to express our love of nature, of simple living 
and the untrammeled joys of the great out-of- 
doors, by responding to a naturalistic or ro¬ 
mantic type of garden rather than the formal 
or classic. 
The movement called “romanticism” first 
came into being from a desire to turn again 
to Nature for inspiration and guidance. In 
planning a romantic garden the landscape 
architect studies Nature in her every mood 
and discovers many of her hidden laws. These 
he uses to transform barren, uninteresting sur¬ 
roundings into realms of sylvan loveliness, and 
land that already possessed the charm and 
poetry of natural beauty he enhances and 
makes more perfect by his discriminating art, 
arranging and combining each feature until 
it is brought into a fine harmony with the 
general garden scheme. 
A Studied Design 
The romantic garden, whose apparent nat¬ 
uralness appeals so strongly to our love of 
comfort and our enjoyment of rustic beauty, 
is as definitely the result of a studied design 
and is as carefully thought out and carried to 
perfection as are any of the elaborate conven¬ 
tional effects that characterize the classic gar¬ 
den. Many of us do not realize this, for the 
design from which the romantic garden is 
eventually evolved is slow to unfold. It util¬ 
izes and accentuates every inherent quality of 
beauty the place possesses, until an illusion 
is created which makes us forget that the 
happy consummation is the result of man’s 
planning and cunning rather than the un¬ 
curbed, spontaneous growth of Nature. But 
in the formal garden, the design is instantly 
apparent. The same fundamental principles 
of design, however, govern the one as the other, 
based upon an accurate knowledge of pro¬ 
portion, unity and balance. 
The general layout of a romantic garden 
depends largely upon the position, shape and 
size of the grounds—whether the land is flat 
or rolling, and whether it boasts of fine trees, 
water, rocks or other natural features which 
are treated as special points of interest. Na¬ 
ture is ever delightfully suggestive. 
A lovable old tree immediately beckons us 
on until we have trod a path, either straight 
or devious, to its protecting shade and then 
both path and tree demand a seat where one 
