76 
House & Garden 
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INCORPORATED 
Designers and Manufacturers of Lighting Fixtures 
101 PARK AVENUE AT FORTIETH STREET 
NEW YORK CITY 
DECORATION AND DIRECTORY OF FINE ARTS 
THE NIGHT RACK 
/»N orderly attendant for day clothes at 
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^ A in one place. Clothing held to form, 
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Racks finished in mahogany, walnut or ivory. 
Colored enamels made to match samples. A 
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Price $15 
nop^rammono 
STUDIOS 
HUNTINGTON, WEST VA. 
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MacBRIDE 
OF 
“THE HOUSE OF THREE GABLES" 
IT WEST 51ST ST., NEW YORK 
DECORATIVE INTERIORS 
Italian Oak Chair, no cushion 
Tricorner Stand 
Lamp and Shade 
25.00 
25.00 
25.00 
Gardens of Spain and Portugal 
(Continued from page 74) 
a white rose and a cistus. He sends a 
gift of the new fruit called banana, 
which he describes as having a flavor 
between a quince and a peach. His 
gardener Frate Francesco is directed to 
put plenty of roses in between his 
groves and the boundary walls and to 
see that they are trained to grow on a 
trellis, after the fashion practised in 
Spain. 
Famous among these older gardens 
were the Cigarralas of Toledo where 
Cardinal Quiroja and his canons took 
their ease under the ripening apricot 
trees, where at evening time the great El 
Greco came out to walk up and down 
the terraced mountain decked with the 
marble urns brought from Rome by 
Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in company 
with his dear Fray Hortensio and 
Covarrubias, discussing passages from 
Homer and Aristotle, Petrarch and Ari¬ 
osto, or hearing their friend Josef de 
Valdivielso read from his Romancero 
Espiritual, and the roguish Tirso de Mo¬ 
lina rattling off snatches of the novels, 
poems and plays that were later pub¬ 
lished under the title of Cigarrales de 
Toledo (1616-1635). 
All nature seems to unite to dis¬ 
play her universal products in the 
central regions of Portugal. Nowhere 
else can be seen such contrasts; 
for here on one side are chestnuts, and 
beside them great camelias under their 
heavy weight of crimson and pink blos¬ 
soms. Mighty oaks mingle their branches 
with lofty magnolias; cedars cast dark 
shadows over Brazilian ferns; arau¬ 
carias, enormous pines, mingle on the 
slopes with elms; date palms interlace 
with enormous hortensias; strangely 
shaped geraniums, all kinds of roses, all 
the flowers that grow in the Russian 
springtimes, on the Norwegian fjords, 
on the Himalayan steeps, blooms of dif¬ 
ferent epochs and different climes, unite 
to form wonderful haunts of beauty 
through which we can catch glimpses of 
palaces, castles and monasteries with 
ghostly presences of many centuries and 
the whispers of the joys and sorrows of 
a vanished world. 
Around the old Alcazar in Cintra the 
gardens have disappeared, but under the 
Castello de Pena there are lovely relics 
of oldtime gardening, beautiful water- 
runs and artfully placed pools under the 
shadows of heavy forests filled with 
nightingales. The French influences, al¬ 
ways powerful in all that concerns Por¬ 
tugal, have laid a distinctive mark upon 
the surviving gardens, but we have in 
the writings of Sa de Miranda (1489- 
1558) plentiful details of his Quinta da 
Tapada, the fertile valley of Minho on 
the banks of the Neiva. This garden- 
loving poet and philosopher sings cease¬ 
lessly of his orchards and farms, his 
flowers and fruits. He traces the life 
of a scholar in the country among his 
books with his pastoral friends and 
hunting hounds. The picture speaks of 
comfort, and pleasant occupations rather 
than of formal art or a life of prescribed 
convention. 
Royal Gardens at Cintra 
There still exists at Cintra the royal 
domain of Ramalhao, built by King 
Diniz (1279-1325) for his wife Saint 
Isabel of Portugal, a curious melancholy 
garden. Near Cintra is also the old 
park of Regaleira, as well as the estate 
of Monserrate, dating from 1580, the 
home of the eccentric author Beckford 
who restored i't with the aid of the 
English architect Burnett and the gar¬ 
dener Burt, making a marvellous combi¬ 
nation of northern and southern beau¬ 
ties. Most interesting, however, of the 
Cintra gardens is Penha Verde, the re¬ 
treat of the great Indian Viceroy Joao 
de Castro (1500-1548) for which he 
sighed in the midst of his victories of 
Cambaya and Diu. “Here”, says one 
of his early biographers, “he amused 
himself with a new and strange kind of 
agriculture, for he cut down fruit-bear¬ 
ing trees and planted wildwoods, per¬ 
haps to show that he was so disinter¬ 
ested that not even from the earth 
would he expect reward.” He decked 
his lands with stones bearing ancient 
Sanscrit inscriptions, constructed lovely 
staircases of brick faced with Dutch 
azulejos or tiles, now half buried in the 
moss. When bidden to ask favor from 
the King, he craved only “a chestnut 
grove which you have in the Serra of 
Cintra, by the King’s Fountain, border¬ 
ing on my quinta, that my servants 
having chestnuts to eat on my estate 
may not go plundering what does not 
belong to them.” Hither he begged to 
return from India a few days before he 
died in the arms of Saint Francis Xavier 
at Goa. 
Near Coimbra there still exists the 
Quinta das Lagrimas, with its Fonte dos 
Amores, where the fair Inez de Castro 
was murdered in 1355, as Camoens so 
tragically relates. It is a melancholy 
stretch of boxwood paths, some broken 
arches with rocks and trees, an arrange¬ 
ment interesting to the student of old 
Portuguese gardening. Close at hand, 
at Bussaco, is the ancient Monastery of 
the Carmelites dating from 1268. Its 
cells are lined with cork and it still can 
boast of its matchless cypresses, gigantic 
oaks and chestnuts, which a papal bull 
of Urban VIII in 1643 protected with 
a threat of excommunication on anyone 
who should dare to injure this “sacred 
forest”. 
Near Madrid 
Along the Manzanares near Madrid 
we come upon gardens created nearer to 
our own days, such as the Villa del 
Campo of the King and the neighbor¬ 
ing estates of the families of Vargas, 
Lujanes and Coellos, that were the 
original settings for the dramas of Lope 
de Vega and Calderon, and are to be 
seen in the background of Goya’s tapes¬ 
tries in 1777. There was also Goya’s 
little house and garden, the Villa del 
Sordo, with its view of the plain of 
Madrid and the Guadarramas, like, as 
he said himself, the Roman Campagna 
and the Alban Hills. 
A typical 18th Century garden may 
be seen in the Parque Maria Luisa, 
which will be remembered by visitors 
to Sevilla. It stretches along the Gua¬ 
dalquivir on so low a level that it suffers 
from the winter inundations of the 
stream. Originally part of the gardens 
of the Palacio San Elmo erected in 
1734, it displays in its numerous pebbly 
paths, trimmed boxwood and florid 
statuary the Franco-Spanish taste of its 
century. 
This sums up the story, untreated as 
yet by any exhaustive author in Spain 
or elsewhere, of the informal charms 
and romantic personal character of 
Peninsular gardens. It would be a real 
refreshment of spirit to find their pe¬ 
culiarities studied and copied by our 
own landscape artists so busy at present 
in transferring the sentimental qualities 
of English vistas and the stiffness of 
French theorists to our home parks and 
gardens. More careful study of Moor¬ 
ish motives and old Spanish monastic 
retreats would surely result in greater 
variety in our gardens. 
