House £ff Garden 
A HEDGED RAMP VILLA LANTE 
From a Water-color by George Walter Da tuson 
tenement window; the stately gardens of 
palace and castle; the sweet, trim gardens 
of our ancestors; the Babylonian terraced 
gardens and the terraced hillside gardens of 
Italy; the classic garden of Greece and 
Rome; the flower-bordered pools of Spain 
and Persia ; and the gardens of the far East, 
all attest man’s love of flowers and grass, 
and trees, his love of bright sunshine and 
cool shadow, of pleasant odors and magic 
sounds. 
Our appreciation of Nature becomes all 
the more glorious, as we begin to realize 
how superbly superior she is to our efforts 
to imitate her. As we realize this more 
and more, comes a growing appreciation for 
those things artistic, which are, after all, 
man’s creations and expressions, not Na¬ 
ture’s, and not servile imitations of Nature. 
The two are so distinct. It is this dual 
something, then, that we shall find in the 
great gardens of the world, and the ones 
under consideration, the Italian, exemplify 
for us, perhaps better than any others that 
have ever been, that beautiful relation of Art 
and Nature, that joy of man’s going out to 
meet Nature and Nature’s willing desire to 
help his efforts. 
If we recall the period of the fourteenth, 
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in Italy, we 
will remember it was a period of great intel¬ 
lectual development, as well as an age of 
much “civility and elegance.” What a list 
of names is to be found here, from Dante to 
Michael Angelo ! Men of great intelligence 
and understanding there were, men who 
could and did do marvelous things, not in 
one branch of art alone but in all. Painting 
beautiful frescoes, sculpturing wonderful 
marbles, building great churches and palaces, 
designing villas and gardens, each of these 
men comprehended not only his own special 
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