House £s? Garden 
IN THE BORGHESE GARDENS, ROME 
An example of a park wood-path 
give at a given place to the human 
over the natural element. The 
well-hewn and graded slopes and 
levels and bridges of a great 
mountain pass may rightly be 
treated as merely utilitarian, laid 
out on the lines of the most utter 
reasonableness, the best engineer¬ 
ing—just, for instance, as the 
Wissahickon Drive—without un¬ 
due expense offinish or perfection 
of curve. Nature will take care 
of them if she is left to herself; 
and as time goes on, the ravages 
of man’s hand will be lovingly 
hidden by moss and leaf,and there 
will be nothing to mar our sense 
of the reasonable and beautiful. 
But in agreatcity,orits park,or 
within the well-kept precincts of 
a country place close to the house, 
where man must be constantly 
reminded of his own existence, 
where people congregate, there it 
is appropriate that the greatest 
architectural perfection, the most 
careful study of design, should be 
given to every artificial work. We 
are so trained to think that what 
we build in the shape of a house 
must be carefully studied by men 
who have given their lives to the subject, 
whose life-work it is to design, that in this last 
century we have forgotten that all building, all 
artificial interference with the face of Nature, 
is only the visible or the physical expression 
of man on the face of the earth. And the same 
principles of design that determine the propor¬ 
tions of a facade govern the dimensions that 
we would spread out on the face of the ground. 
A flight of steps out under the open sky is just 
as much a matter of nice design and propor¬ 
tion as a facade of a building. We are not used 
to thinking so, especially here in this part of 
the world, but I believe we are coming to it; 
and everyone did think so beforethe beginning 
of the century just past. All outdoor design 
was considered as only a part of architecture, 
and the same nicety and skill was applied to it 
as in the building of houses. The idea is not 
only unfamiliar to us of the present day, but 
it is one I have myself found very hard to put 
into practice. We have all of us grown up in an 
atmosphere of believing that the work a man 
does with pick and spade is an entirely different 
thing from what he does with hammer and 
saw, but it should not have been so considered. 
Let Nature, so far as she will, clothe this 
work of ours—whether it be simple or elaborate 
—in her own way, and still the effect will be 
more and more beautiful. The two elements 
will stand in stronger and stronger contrast to 
each other; not in discord, but in utter har¬ 
mony and agreement. I, by no means, urge 
elaboration or over much ornament in that 
which we do. In this we should be governed by 
the same rules of good taste and restraint that 
should characterize every architectural work. 
In this country, we have been so affected by 
the school of landscape gardening, to which I 
have referred, that we are afraid of the doc¬ 
trine of formalism. The American of to-day, 
when he sets about improving the landscape, 
is very apt to think that he should confine his 
formal work to buildings ; and, after that, pitch 
605 
