Garden-Craft Old and New

by John Dando Sedding

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN."

"'Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar
Bold Alteration pleades
Large evidence; but Nature soon
Her righteous doom areads."—Spenser.

Why were the old-fashioned gardens destroyed? Firstly, because the traditional garden of the early part of the eighteenth century, when the reaction set in, represented a style which had run to seed, and men were tired of it; secondly, because the taste for foreign trees and shrubs, that had existed for a long time previously, then came to a head, and it was found that the old type of garden was not fitted for the display of the augmented stock of foreign material. Here was a new element in garden-craft, a new chance of decoration in the way of local colours in planting, which required a new adjustment of garden-effects; and as there was some difficulty in accommodating the new and the old, the problem was met by the abolition of the old altogether.

As to this matter of the sudden increase of specimen plants, Loudon remarks that in the earlier century the taste for foreign plants was confined to a few, and they not wealthy persons; but in the eighteenth century the taste for planting foreign trees extended itself among rich landed proprietors. A host of amateurs, botanists, and commercial gardeners were busily engaged in enriching the British Arboretum, and the garden-grounds had to be arranged for new effects and a new mode of culture. In Loudon's "Arboretum" (p. 126) is a list of the species of foreign trees and shrubs introduced into England up to the year 1830. He calculates that the total number of specimens up to the time that he wrote was about 1400, but the numbers taken by centuries are: in the sixteenth century, 89; in the seventeenth century, 131; in the eighteenth century, 445; and in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, 699!

Men stubbed up the old gardens because they had grown tired of their familiar types, as they tire of other familiar things. The eighteenth century was essentially a critical age, an age of enquiry, and gardening, along with art, morals, and religion, came in for its share of coffee-house discussion, and elaborate essay-writing, and nothing was considered satisfactory. As to gardening, it was not natural enough for the critics. The works of Salvator and Poussin had pictured the grand and terrible in scenery, Thomson was writing naturalistic poetry, Rousseau naturalistic prose. Garden-ornament was too classical and formal for the varnished littérateur of the Spectator and the Guardian—too symmetrical for the jingling rhymester of a sing-song generation—too artificial for the essayist "'Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar," albeit he is privately content to go on touching up his groves and grottoes at Twickenham, securing the services of a peer

"To form his quincunx, and to rank his vines."

Gardens are looked upon as so much "copy" to the essayist. What affected tastes have these critics! What a confession of counterfeit love, of selfish literary interest in gardens is this of Addison's: "I think there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry. Your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are romance writers." How beside nature, beside garden-craft, are such pen-man's whimsies! "Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," Bacon would say.

Walpole's essay on gardening is entertaining reading, and his book gives us glimpses of the country-seats of all the great ladies and gentlemen who had the good fortune to be his acquaintances. His condemnation of the geometrical style of gardening common in his day, though quieter in tone than Pope's, was none the less effective in promoting a change of style. He tells how in Kip's views of the seats of our nobility we have the same "tiring and returning uniformity." Every house is approached by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a gravel-walk and two grass plats or borders of flowers. "Each rises above the other by two or three steps, and as many walks and terrasses; and so many iron gates, that we recollect those ancient romances in which every entrance was guarded by nymphs or dragons. At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each, I suppose, not a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between two terrasses that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a line of pyramidal yews. A bowling-green was all the lawn admitted in those times, a circular lake the extent of magnificence."

Such an air of truth and soberness pervades Walpole's narrative, and to so absurd an extent has formality been manifestly carried under the auspices of Loudon and Wise, who had stocked our gardens with "giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms, mottoes in yew, box, and holly," that we are almost persuaded to be Vandals. "The compass and square, were of more use in plantations than the nursery-man. The measured walk, the quincunx, and the étoile imposed their unsatisfying sameness.... Trees were headed, and their sides pared away; many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. Seats of marble, arbours, and summer-houses, terminated every vista." It is all very well for Temple to recommend the regular form of garden. "I should hardly advise any of these attempts" cited by Walpole, "in the form of gardens among us; they are adventures of too hard achievement for any common hands." The truth will out! The "dainter sense" of garden-craft has vanished! According to Walpole, garden-adventure is to be henceforth journeyman's work, and Brown, the immortal kitchen-gardener, leads the way.

It were unfair to suspect that the exigencies of sprightly writing had carried Walpole beyond the bounds of accuracy in his description of the stiff-garden as he knew it, for things were in some respects very bad indeed. At the same time he is so engrossed with his abuse of old ways of gardening, and advocacy of the landscape-gardener's new-fangled notions, that his account of garden-craft generally falls short of completeness. He omits, for instance, to notice the progress in floriculture and horticulture of this time, the acquisitions being made in the ornamental foreign plants to be cultivated in the open ground, the green-house, and the stove. He omits to note that Loudon and Wise stocked our gardens with more than giants, animals, monsters, &c., in yew and box and holly. Because the names of these two worthies occur in this gardening text-book of Walpole's, all later essayists signal them out for blame. But Evelyn, who ranks as one of the three of England's great gardeners of old days, has a kindlier word for them. He is dilating upon the advantage to the gardener of the high clipped hedge as a protection for his shrubs and flowers, and goes on to particularise an oblong square, palisadoed with a hornbeam hedge "in that inexhaustible magazine at Brompton Park, cultivated by those two industrious fellow-gardeners, Mr Loudon and Mr Wise." This hedge protects the orange trees, myrtles, and other rare perennials and exotics from the scorching rays of the sun; and it equally well shelters the flowers. "Here the Indian Narcissus, Tuberoses, Japan Lillies, Jasmines, Jonquills, Periclimena, Roses, Carnations, with all the pride of the parterre, intermixt between the tree-cases, flowery vases, busts, and statues, entertain the eye, and breathe their redolent odours and perfumes to the smell." Clearly there is an advantage in being a gardener if we write about gardens (provided you are not a mere "landscape-gardener!").

One cannot deny that Horace Walpole did well to expose the absurd vagaries which were being perpetrated about his time under Dutch influences. Close alliance with Holland through the House of Orange had affected every department of horticulture. True, it had enriched our gardens and conservatories with many rare and beautiful species of flowers and bulbs, and had imbued the English collector with the tulip-mania. So far good. But to the same source we trace the reign of the shears in the English garden, which made Art in a Garden ridiculous, and gave occasion to the enemy to blaspheme.

"The gardeners about London," says Mr Lambert, writing to the Linnæan Transactions in 1712, "were remarkable for fine cut greens, and clipt yews in the shapes of birds, dogs, men, ships, &c. Mr. Parkinson in Lambeth was much noticed for these things, and he had besides a few myrtles, oleanders, and evergreens."

"The old order changeth ...
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

And now is Art in a Garden become ridiculous. Since the beginning of things English gardeners had clipped and trimmed their shrubs; but had never carried the practice beyond a reasonable extent, and had combined it with woody and shady effects. With the onset of Dutch influence country-aspects vanish. Nature is reduced to a prosaic level. The traditional garden, whose past had been one long series of noble chances in fine company, now found content as the pedant's darling where it could have no opening for living romance, but must be tricked out in stage conventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of shreds and patches!

Having arrived at such a pass, it was time that change should come, and change did come, with a vengeance! But let us not suppose that the change was from wrong to right. For, indeed, the revolution meant only that formality gone mad should be supplanted by informality gone equally mad. And we may note as a significant fact, that the point of departure is the destruction of the garden's boundaries, and the substitution of the ha-ha. It was not for the wild improvers to realise how Art that destroys its own boundaries is certainly doomed to soon have no country to boast of at all! It proved so in this case. From this moment, the very thought of garden-ornament was clean put out of mind, and the grass is carried up to the windows of the great house, as though the place were nothing better than a farm-shanty in the wilds of Westmoreland!

But to return to the inauguration of the "landscape-garden." The hour produced its men in Kent, and "the immortal Brown," as Repton calls him. Like many another "discovery," theirs was really due to an accident. Just as it was the closely-corked bottle that popped that gave birth to champagne, so it was only when our heroes casually leaped the ha-ha that they had made that they realised that all England outside was one vast rustic garden, from whence it were a shame to exclude anything!

So began the rage for making all the surroundings of a house assume a supposed appearance of rude Nature. Levelling, ploughing, stubbing-up, was the order of the day. The British navvy was in great request—in fact the day that Kent and Brown discovered England was this worthy's natal day. Artificial gardens must be demolished as impostures, and wriggling walks and turf put where they had stood. Avenues must be cut down or disregarded; the groves, the alleys, the formal beds, the terraces, the balustrades, the clipt hedges must be swept away as things intolerable. For the "landscape style" does not countenance a straight line, or terrace or architectural form, or symmetrical beds about the house; for to allow these would not be to photograph Nature. As carried into practice, the style demands that the house shall rise abruptly from the grass, and the general surface of the ground shall be characterised by smoothness and bareness (like Nature)! Hence in the grounds of this period, house and country

"Wrapt all o'er in everlasting green
Make one dull, vapid, smooth and tranquil scene."

There is to my mind no more significant testimony to the attractiveness and loveableness of the regular garden as opposed to the opened-out barbarism of the landscape-gardener's invention, than Horace Walpole's lament over the old gardens at Houghton,[29] which has the force of testimony wrung from unwilling lips:—

"When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told me it was now called the 'pleasure-ground.' What a dissonant idea of pleasure! Those groves, those alleys, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown; many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my memory. I met two gamekeepers and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;—Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin!"—(Walpole's Letters.)

"What a dissonant idea of pleasure," this so-called "pleasure-ground of the landscape-gardener!" "Those groves, those alleys where I have passed so many charming moments, stripped up! How I loved this garden!" Here is the biter bit, and it were to be more than human not to smile!

With all the proper appliances at hand it did not take long to transform the stiff garden into the barbaric. It did not take long to find out how not to do what civilization had so long been learning how to do! The ancient "Geometric or Regular style" of garden—the garden of the aristocrat, with all its polished classicism—was to make way for the so-called "Naturalesque or Landscape style," and the garden of the bourgeois. Hope rose high in the breasts of the new professoriate. "A boon! a boon!" quoth the critic. And there is deep joy in navvydom. "Under the great leader, Brown," writes Repton ("Landscape Gardening," p. 327), "or rather those who patronised his discovery, we were taught that Nature was to be our only model." It was a grand moment. A Daniel had come to judgment! Nay, did not Brown "live to establish a fashion in gardening which might have been expected to endure as long as Nature should exist!"

The Landscape School of Gardeners, so-called, has been the theme of a great deal of literature, but with the exception of Walpole's and Addison's essays, and Pope's admirable chaff, very little has survived the interest it had at the moment of publication.

The other chief writers of this School, in its early phase, are George Mason, Whately,[30] Mason the poet, and Shenstone, our moon-struck friend quoted above, with his "assignation seats with proper mottoes, urns to faithful lovers," &c. Dr Johnson did not think much of Shenstone's contributions to gardening:

"He began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters, which he did with such judgement and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful—a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view, to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden—demand any great powers of the mind, I will not enquire; perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason."—(Dr Johnson, "Lives of the Poets," Shenstone.)

Whately's "Observations on Modern Gardening," published in 1770, are well written and distinctly valuable as bearing upon the historical side of the subject. It says little for his idea of the value of Art in a garden, or of the function of a garden as a refining influence in life, to find Whately recommending "a plain field or a sheep-walk" as part of a garden's embellishments—"as an agreeable relief, and even wilder scenes."

But what astounds one more is, that a writer of Whately's calibre can describe Kent's gardens at Stowe, considered to be his masterpiece, as a sample of the non-formality of the landscape-gardener's Art, while he takes elaborate pains to show that it is full of would-be artistic subterfuges in Nature, full of architectural shams throughout. These gardens were begun by Bridgman, "Begun," Whately says, "when regularity was in fashion; and the original boundary is still preserved on account of its magnificence, for round the whole circuit, of between three and four miles, is carried a very broad gravel-walk, planted with rows of trees, and open either to the park or the country; a deep sunk-fence attends it all the way, and comprehends a space of near 400 acres. But in the interior spaces of the garden few traces of regularity appear; where it yet remains in the plantations it is generally disguised; every symptom almost of formality is obliterated from the ground; and an octagon basin at the bottom is now converted into an irregular piece of water, which receives on one hand two beautiful streams, and falls on the other down a cascade into a lake."

And then follows a list of sham architectural features that are combined with sham views and prospects to match. "The whole space is divided into a number of scenes, each distinguished with taste and fancy; and the changes are so frequent, so sudden and complete, the transitions so artfully conducted, that the ideas are never continued or repeated to satiety." In the front of the house two elegant Doric pavilions. On the brow of some rising grounds a Corinthian arch. On a little knoll an open Ionic rotunda—an Egyptian pyramid stands on its brow; the Queen's Pillar in a recess on the descent, the King's Pillar elsewhere; all the three buildings mentioned are "peculiarly adapted to a garden scene." In front of a wood three pavilions joined by arcades, all of the Ionic order, "characteristically proper for a garden, and so purely ornamental." Then a Temple of Bacchus, the Elysian fields, British remains; misshaped elms and ragged firs are frequent in a scene of solitude and gloom, which the trunks of dead trees assist. Then a large Gothic building, with slated roofs, "in a noble confusion"; then the Elysian fields, seen from the other side, a Palladian bridge, Doric porticoes, &c., the whole thing finished off with the Temple of Concord and Victory, probably meant as a not-undeserved compliment to the successfully chaotic skill of the landscape-gardener, who is nothing if not irregular, natural, non-formal, non-fantastical, non-artificial, and non-geometrical.

Two other points about Whately puzzle me. How comes he to strain at the gnat of formality in the old-fashioned garden, yet readily swallow the camel at Stowe? How can he harmonise his appreciation of the elaborately contrived and painfully assorted shams at Stowe, with his recommendation, of a sheep-walk in your garden "as an agreeable relief, and even wilder scenes"?

Whether the beauty of the general disposition of the ground at Stowe is to be attributed to Kent or to Bridgman, who began the work, as Whately says, "when regularity was in fashion," I cannot say. It is right to observe, however, that the prevailing characteristic of Kent's and Brown's landscapes was their smooth and bald surface. "Why this art has been called 'landscape-gardening,'" says the plain-spoken Repton, "perhaps he who gave it the title may explain. I can see no reason, unless it be the efficacy which it has shown in destroying landscapes, in which, indeed, it seems infallible." (Repton, p. 355.) "Our virtuosi," said Sir William Chambers, "have scarcely left an acre of shade, or three trees growing in a line from the Land's End to the Tweed."

It did not take the wiser spirits long to realise that Nature left alone was more natural. And this same Repton, who began by praising "the great leader Brown," has to confess again and again that, so far as results go, he is mistaken. The ground, he laments, must be everlastingly moved and altered. "One of the greatest difficulties I have experienced in practice proceeds from that fondness for levelling so prevalent in all Brown's workmen; every hillock is by them lowered, and every hollow filled, to produce a level surface." (Repton, p. 342.) Or again (p. 347): "There is something so fascinating in the appearance of water, that Mr Brown thought it carried its own excuse, however unnatural the situation; and therefore, in many places, under his direction, I have found water, on the tops of the hills, which I have been obliged to remove into lower ground because the deception was not sufficiently complete to satisfy the mind as well as the eye." Indeed, in this matter of levelling, Brown's system does not, on the face of it, differ from Le Nôtre's, where the natural contour of the landscape was not of much account; or rather, it was thought the better if it had no natural contour at all, but presented a flat plain or plateau with no excrescences to interfere with the designer's schemes.

So much, then, for the pastoral simplicity of Nature edited by the "landscape-gardener." And let us note that under the auspices of the new régime, not only is Nature to be changed, but changed more than was ever dreamt of before; the transformation shall at once be more determined in its character and more deceptive than had previously been attempted. We were to have an artistically natural world, not a naturally artistic one; the face of the landscape was to be purged of its modern look and made to look primæval. And in this doing, or undoing, of things, the only art that was to be admitted was the art of consummate deceit, which shall "satisfy the mind as well as the eye." Yet call the man pope or presbyter, and beneath his clothes he is the same man! There is not a pin to choose as regards artificiality in the aims of the two schools, only in the results. The naked or undressed garden has studied irregularity, while the dressed garden has studied regularity and style. The first has, perhaps, an excessive regard for expression, the other has an emphatic scorn for expression. One garden has its plotted levels, its avenues, its vistas, its sweeping lawns, its terraces, its balustrades, colonnades, geometrical beds, gilded temples, and sometimes its fountains that won't play, and its fine vases full of nothing! The other begins with fetching back the chaos of a former world, and has for its category of effects, sham primævalisms, exaggerated wildness, tortured levellings, cascades, rocks, dead trunks of trees, ruined castles, lakes on the top of hills, and sheep-runs hard by your windows. One school cannot keep the snip of the scissors off tree and shrub, the other mimics Nature's fortuitous wildness in proof of his disdain for the white lies of Art.

And all goes to show, does it not? that inasmuch as the art of gardening implies craft, and as man's imitation of Nature is bound to be unlike Nature, it were wise to be frankly inventive in gardening on Art lines. Success may attend one's efforts in the direction of Art, but in the direction of Nature, never.

The smooth, bare, and almost bald appearance which characterises Brown and Kent's school fails to satisfy for long, and there springs up another school which deals largely in picturesque elements, and rough intricate effects. The principles of the "Picturesque School," as it was called, are to be found in the writings of the Rev. William Gilpin and Sir Uvedale Price. Their books are full of careful observations upon the general composition of landscape-scenery, and what was then called "Landscape Architecture," as though every English building of older days that was worth a glance had not been "Landscape Architecture" fit for its site! Gilpin's writings contain an admirable discourse upon "Forest Scenery," well illustrated. This work is in eight volumes, in part published in 1782, and it consists mainly in an account of the author's tours in every part of Great Britain, with a running commentary on the beauties of the scenery, and a description of the important country seats he passed on the way. Price helped by his writings to stay the rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and we note that he is fully alive to the necessity of uniting a country-house with the surrounding scenery by architectural adjuncts.

The taste for picturesque gardening was doubtless helped by the growing taste for landscape painting, exhibited in the works of the school of Wilson and Gainsborough, and in the pastoral writings of Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and Gray. It would farther be accelerated, as we suggested at the outset of this chapter, by the large importation of foreign plants and shrubs now going on.

What is known as the Picturesque School soon had for its main exponent Repton. He was a genius in his way—a born gardener,[31] able and thoughtful in his treatments, and distinguished among his fellows by a broad and comprehensive grasp of the whole character and surroundings of a site, in reference to the general section of the land, the style of the house to which his garden was allied, and the objects for which it was to be used. The sterling quality of his writings did much to clear the air of the vapourings of the critics who had gone before him, and his practice, founded as it was upon sound principles, redeemed the absurdities of the earlier phase of his school and preserved others from further development of the silly rusticities upon which their mind seemed bent. Although some of his ideas may now be thought pedantic and antiquated, the books which contain them will not die. Passages like the following mark the man and his aims: "I do not profess to follow Le Nôtre or Brown, but, selecting beauties from the style of each, to adopt so much of the grandeur of the former as may accord with a palace, and so much of the grace of the latter as may call forth the charms of natural landscape. Each has its proper situation; and good taste will make fashion subservient to good sense" (p. 234). "In the rage for picturesque beauty, let us remember that the landscape holds an inferior rank to the historical picture; one represents nature, the other relates to man in a state of society" (p. 236).

Repton sums up the whole of his teaching in the preface to his "Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening" under the form of objections to prevailing errors, and they are so admirable that I cannot serve the purposes of my book better than to insert them here.

Objection No. 1. "There is no error more prevalent in modern gardening, or more frequently carried to excess, than taking away hedges to unite many small fields into one extensive and naked lawn before plantations are made to give it the appearance of a park; and where ground is subdivided by sunk fences, imaginary freedom is dearly purchased at the expense of actual confinement."

No. 2. "The baldness and nakedness round the house is part of the same mistaken system, of concealing fences to gain extent. A palace, or even an elegant villa, in a grass field, appears to me incongruous; yet I have seldom had sufficient influence to correct this common error."

No. 3. "An approach which does not evidently lead to the house, or which does not take the shortest course, cannot be right. (This rule must be taken with certain limitations.) The shortest road across a lawn to a house will seldom be found graceful, and often vulgar. A road bordered by trees in the form of an avenue may be straight without being vulgar; and grandeur, not grace or elegance, is the expression expected to be produced."

No. 4. "A poor man's cottage, divided into what is called a pair of lodges, is a mistaken expedient to mark importance in the entrance to a park."

No. 5. "The entrance-gate should not be visible from the mansion, unless it opens into a courtyard."

No. 6. "The plantation surrounding a place called a Belt I have never advised; nor have I ever willingly marked a drive, or walk, completely round the verge of a park, except in small villas, where a dry path round a person's own field is always more interesting than any other walk."

No 7. "Small plantations of trees, surrounded by a fence, are the best expedients to form groups, because trees planted singly seldom grow well; neglect of thinning and removing the fence has produced that ugly deformity called a Clump."

No. 8. "Water on a eminence, or on the side of a hill, is among the most common errors of Mr Brown's followers; in numerous instances I have been allowed to remove such pieces of water from the hills to the valleys, but in many my advice has not prevailed."

No. 9. "Deception may be allowable in imitating the works of Nature. Thus artificial rivers, lakes, and rock scenery can only be great by deception, and the mind acquiesces in the fraud after it is detected, but in works of Art every trick ought to be avoided. Sham churches, sham ruins, sham bridges, and everything which appears what it is not, disgusts when the trick is discovered."

No. 10. "In buildings of every kind the character should be strictly observed. No incongruous mixture can be justified. To add Grecian to Gothic, or Gothic to Grecian, is equally absurd; and a sharp pointed arch to a garden gate or a dairy window, however frequently it occurs, is not less offensive than Grecian architecture, in which the standard rules of relative proportion are neglected or violated."

The perfection of landscape-gardening consists in the fullest attention to these principles, Utility, Proportion, and Unity, or harmony of parts to the whole. (Repton, "Landscape Gardening," pp. 128-9.)

The best advice one can give to a young gardener is—know your Repton.

The writings of the new school of gardening, of which Repton is a notable personage in its later phase, are not, however, on a par with the writings of the old traditional school, either as pleasant garden literature, or in regard to broad human interest or artistic quality. They are hard and critical, and never lose the savour of the heated air of controversy in which they were penned. Indeed, I can think of no more sure and certain cure for a bad attack of garden-mania—nothing that will sooner wipe the bloom off your enjoyment of natural beauty—than a course of reading from the Classics of Landscape-garden literature! "I only sound the clarion," said the urbane master-gardener of an earlier day, "but I enter not into the battle." But these are at one another's throats! Who enters here must leave his dreams of fine gardening behind, for he will find himself in a chilly, disenchanted world, with nothing more romantic to feed his imagination upon than "Remarks on the genius of the late Mr. Brown," Critical enquiries, Observations on taste, Difference between landscape gardening and painting, Price upon Repton, Repton upon Price, Repton upon Knight, further answers to Messrs Price and Knight, &c. But all this is desperately dull reading, hurtful to one's imagination, fatal to garden-fervour.[32] And naturally so, for analysis of the processes of garden-craft carried too far begets loss of faith in all. Analysis is a kill-joy, destructive of dreams of beauty. "We murder to dissect." That was a true word of the cynic of that day, who summed up current controversy upon gardening in the opinion that "the works of Nature were well executed, but in a bad taste." The quidnuncs' books about gardening are about as much calculated to give one delight, as the music the child gets out of the strings of an instrument that it broke for the pride of dissection. Even Addison, with the daintiest sense and prettiest pen of them all, shows how thoroughly gardening had lost

... "its happy, country tone,
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost,"—

as he thrums out his laboured coffee-house conceit. "I think there are as many kinds of gardening as poetry; your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages, and cascades, are Romance writers. Wise and Loudon are our heroic poets." Nor is his elaborate argument meant to prove the gross inferiority of Art in a garden to unadorned Nature more inspiring. Nay, what is one to make of even the logic of such argument as this? "If the products of Nature rise in value according as they more or less resemble those of Art, we may be sure that artificial works receive a greater advantage from their resemblance of such as are natural." (Spectator.) But who does apply the Art-standard to Nature, or value her products as they resemble those of Art? And has not Sir Walter well said: "Nothing is more the child of Art than a garden"? And Loudon: "All art, to be acknowledged, as art must be avowed."

One prefers to this cold Pindaric garden-homage the unaffected, direct delight in the sweets of a garden of an earlier day; to realise with old Mountaine how your garden shall produce "a jucunditie of minde;" to think with Bishop Hall, as he gazes at his tulips, "These Flowers are the true Clients of the Sunne;" to be brought to old Lawson's state of simple ravishment, "What more delightsome than an infinite varietie of sweet-smelling flowers? decking with sundry colours the green mantle of the Earth, colouring not onely the earth, but decking the ayre, and sweetning every breath and spirit;" to taste the joys of living as, taking Robert Burton's hand, you "walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such like pleasant places, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side, to disport in some pleasant plain or park, must needs be a delectable recreation;" to be inoculated with old Gerarde of the garden-mania as he bursts forth, "Go forward in the name of God: graffe, set, plant, nourishe up trees in every corner of your grounde;" to trace with Temple the lines and features that go to make the witchery of the garden at Moor Park, "in all kinds the most beautiful and perfect, at least in the Figure and Disposition, that I have ever seen," and which you may follow if you are not "above the Regards of Common Expence;" to hearken to Bacon expatiate upon the Art which is indeed "the purest of all humane pleasure, the greatest refreshment to the Spirits of man;" to feel in what he says the value of an ideal, the magic of a style backed by passion—to have garden precepts wrapped in pretty metaphors (such as that "because the Breath of Flowers is far Sweeter in the Air—where it comes and goes like the warbling of Musick—than in the Hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that Delight than to know what be the Flowers and Plants that do best perfume the Air;")—to be taught how to order a garden to suit all the months of the year, and have things of beauty enumerated according to their seasons—to feel rapture at the sweet-breathing presence of Art in a garden—to learn from one who knows how to garden in a grand manner, and yet be finally assured that beauty does not require a great stage, that the things thrown in "for state and magnificence" are but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden—this is garden-literature worth reading!

Compared with the frank raptures of such writings as these, the laboured treatises of the landscape-school are but petty hagglings over the mint and cummin of things. You go to the writings of the masters of the old formality, to come away invigorated as by a whiff of mountain air straight off Helicon; they shall give one fresh enthusiasm for Nature, fresh devotion to Art, fresh love for beautiful things. But from the other—

"The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I"—

they deal with technicalities in the affected language of connoisseurship; they reveal a disenchanted world, a world of exploded hopes given over to the navvies and the critics; and it is no wonder that writings so prompted should have no charm for posterity; charm they never had. They are dry as summer dust.

For the honour of English gardening, and before closing this chapter, I would like to recall that betweenity—the garden of the transition—done at the very beginning of the century of revolution, which unites something of the spirit of the old and of the new schools. Here is Sir Walter Scott's report of the Kelso garden as he first knew it, and after it had been mauled by the landscape-gardener. It was a garden of seven or eight acres adjacent to the house of an ancient maiden lady:

"It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which access was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks, calling itself a labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a splendid Platanus or Oriental plane, a huge hill of leaves, one of the noblest specimens of that regularly beautiful tree which we remember to have seen. In different parts of the garden were fine ornamental trees which had attained great size, and the orchard was filled with fruit-trees of the best description. There were seats and trellis-walks, and a banqueting-house. Even in our time this little scene, intended to present a formal exhibition of vegetable beauty, was going fast to decay. The parterres of flowers were no longer watched by the quiet and simple friends under whose auspices they had been planted, and much of the ornament of the domain had been neglected or destroyed to increase its productive value. We visited it lately, after an absence of many years. Its air of retreat, the seclusion which its alleys afforded was gone; the huge Platanus had died, like most of its kind, in the beginning of this century; the hedges were cut down, the trees stubbed up, and the whole character of the place so much destroyed that I was glad when I could leave it."—("Essay on Landscape Gardening," Quarterly Review, 1828.[33])

Another garden, of later date than this at Kelso, and somewhat less artistic, is that described by Mr Henry A. Bright in "The English Flower Garden."[34]

"One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had every advantage in the soft climate of the West of England. The various lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you wandered on from one to the other, and always came on something new. In front of these shrubberies was a large margin of flower-border, gay with the most effective plants and annuals. At the corner of the lawn a standard Magnolia grandiflora of great size held up its chaliced blossoms; at another a tulip-tree was laden with hundreds of yellow flowers. Here a magnificent Salisburia mocked the foliage of the maiden-hair; and here an old cedar swept the grass with its large pendent branches. But the main breadth of each lawn was never destroyed, and past them you might see the reaches of a river, now in one aspect, now in another. Each view was different, and each was a fresh enjoyment and surprise.

"A few years ago and I revisited the place; the 'improver' had been at work, and had been good enough to open up the view. Shrubberies had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together. The pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had become open spaces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to be seen. Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained numberless rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the lawn in front of the house was cut up into little beds of red pelargoniums, yellow calceolarias, and the rest."

In this example we miss the condensed beauty and sweet austerities of the older garden at Kelso: nevertheless, it represents a phase of workmanship which, for its real insight into the secrets of garden-beauty, we may well be proud of, and deplore its destruction at the hands of the landscape-gardener.

All arts are necessarily subject to progression of type. "Man cannot escape from his time," says Mr Morley, and with changed times come changed influences. But, then, to progress is not to change: "to progress is to live," and one phase of healthy progression will tread the heels of that which precedes it. The restless changeful methods of modern gardening are, however, not to be ascribed to the healthy development of one consistent movement, but to chaos—to the revolution that ensued upon the overthrow of tradition—to the indeterminateness of men who have no guiding principles, who take so many wild leaps in the dark, in the course of which, rival champions jostle one another and only the fittest survives.

In treating of Modern English Gardening, it is difficult to make our way along the tortuous path of change, development it is not, that set in with the banishment of Art in a garden. Critical writers have done their best to unravel things, to find the relation of each fractured phase, and to give each phase a descriptive name, but there are still many unexplained points, many contradictions that are unsolved, to which I have already alluded.

Loudon's Introduction to Repton's "Landscape Gardening" gives perhaps the most intelligible account of the whole matter. The art of laying out grounds has been displayed in two very distinct styles: the first of which is called the "Ancient Roman, Geometric, Regular, or Architectural Style; and the second the Modern, English,[35] Irregular, Natural, or Landscape Style."

We have, he says, the Italian, the French, and the Dutch Schools of the Geometric Style. The Modern, or Landscape Style, when it first displayed itself in English country residences, was distinctly marked by the absence of everything that had the appearance of a terrace, or of architectural forms, or lines, immediately about the house. The house, in short, rose abruptly from the lawn, and the general surface of the ground was characterised by smoothness and bareness. This constituted the first School of the Landscape Style, introduced by Kent and Brown.

This manner was followed by the romantic or Picturesque Style, which inaugurates a School which aimed at producing architectural tricks and devices, allied with scenery of picturesque character and sham rusticity. The conglomeration at Stowe, albeit that it is attributed to Kent, shows what man can do in the way of heroically wrong garden-craft.

To know truly how to lay out a garden "After a more Grand and Rural Manner than has been done before," you cannot do better than get Batty Langley's "New Principles of Gardening," and among other things you have rules whereby you may concoct natural extravagances, how you shall prime prospects, make landscapes that are pictures of nothing and very like; how to copy hills, valleys, dales, purling streams, rocks, ruins, grottoes, precipices, amphitheatres, &c.

The writings of Gilpin and Price were effective in undermining Kent's School; they helped to check the rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and insisted upon the propriety of uniting a country-house with the surrounding scenery by architectural appendages. The leakage from the ranks of Kent's School was not all towards the Picturesque School, but to what Loudon terms Repton's School, which may be considered as combining all that was excellent in what had gone before.

Following upon these phases is one that is oddly called the "Gardenesque" Style, the leading feature of which is that it illustrates the beauty of trees, and other plants individually; in short, it is the specimen style. According to the practice of all previous phases of modern gardening, trees, shrubs, and flowers were indiscriminately mixed and crowded together, in shrubberies or other plantations. According to the Gardenesque School, all the trees and shrubs are arranged to suit their kinds and dimensions, and to display them to advantage. The ablest exponents of the school are Loudon in the recent past, and Messrs Marnock and Robinson in the present, and their method is based upon Loudon.

To know how to lay out a garden after the most approved modern fashion we have but to turn to the deservedly popular pages of "The English Flower Garden." This book contains not only model designs and commended examples from various existing gardens, but text contributed by some seventy professional and amateur gardeners. Even the gardener who has other ideals and larger ambitions than are here expected, heartily welcomes a book so well stored with modern garden-lore up to date, with suggestions for new aspects of vegetation, new renderings of plant life, and must earnestly desire to see any system of gardening made perfect after its kind—

... "I wish the sun should shine
On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine."

Gardening is, above all things, a progressive Art which has never had so fine a time to display its possibilities as now, if we were only wise enough to freely employ old experiences and modern opportunities. People are, however, so readily content with their stereotyped models, with barren imitations, with their petty list of specimens, when instead of half-a-dozen kinds of plants, their garden has room for hundreds of different plants of fine form—hardy or half-hardy, annual and bulbous—which would equally well suit the British garden and add to its wealth of beauty by varied colourings in spring, summer, and autumn. At present "the choke-muddle shrubbery, in which the poor flowering shrubs dwindle and kill each other, generally supports a few ill-grown and ill-chosen plants, but it is mainly distinguished for wide patches of bare earth in summer, over which, in better hands, pretty green things might crowd." The specimen plant has no chance of displaying itself under such conditions.

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Into so nice a subject as the practice of Landscape-gardening of the present day it is not my intention to enter in detail, and for two good reasons. In the first place, the doctrines of a sect are best known by the writings of its representatives; and in this case, happily, both writings and representatives are plentiful. Secondly, I do not see that there is much to chronicle. Landscape-gardening is, in a sense, still in its fumbling stage; it has not increased its resources, or done anything heroic, even on wrong lines; it has not advanced towards any permanent, definable system of ornamentation since it began its gyrations in the last century. Its rival champions still beat the air. Even Repton was better off than the men of to-day, for he had, at least, his Protestant formulary of Ten Objections to swear by, which "mark those errors or absurdities in modern gardening and architecture to which I have never willingly subscribed" (p. 127, "Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening," 1803, quoted in full above).

But the present race of landscape-gardeners are, it strikes me, as much at sea as ever. True they threw up traditional methods as unworthy, but they had not learnt their own Art according to Nature before they began to practise it; and they are still in the throes of education. Their intentions are admirable beyond telling, but their work exhibits in the grossest forms the very vices they condemn in the contrary school; for the expression of their ideas is self-conscious, strained, and pointless. To know at a glance their position towards Art in a garden, how crippled their resources, how powerless to design, let me give an extract from Mr Robinson. He is speaking of an old-fashioned garden, "One of those classical gardens, the planners of which prided themselves upon being able to give Nature lessons of good behaviour, to teach her geometry and the fine Art of irreproachable lines; but Nature abhors lines;[36] she is for geometers a reluctant pupil, and if she submits to their tyranny she does it with bad grace, and with the firm resolve to take eventually her revenge. Man cannot conquer the wildness of her disposition, and so soon as he is no longer at hand to impose his will, so soon as he relaxes his care, she destroys his work" (p. viii., "English Flower Garden"). This is indeed to concede everything to Nature, to deny altogether the mission of Art in a garden.

And even the School that is rather kinder to Art, more lenient to tradition, represented by Mr Milner—even he, in his admirable book upon the "Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening" (1890), is the champion of Nature, not of Art, in a garden. "Nature still seems to work in fetters," he says, and he would "form bases for a better practice of the Art" (p. 4). Again, Nature is the great exemplar that I follow" (p. 8).

They have not got beyond Brown, so far as theory is concerned. "Under the great leader Brown," writes Repton, with unconscious irony, "or rather those who patronised his discovery, we were taught that Nature was to be our only model"—and Brown had his full chance of manipulating the universe, for "he lived to establish a fashion in gardening, which might have been expected to endure as long as Nature should exist"; and yet Repton's work mostly consisted in repairing Brown's errors and in covering the nakedness of his hungry prospects. So it would seem that Art has her revenges as well as Nature! "The way of transgressors is hard!"

The Landscape-gardener, I said, gets no nearer to maturity of purpose as time runs on. He creeps and shuffles after Nature as at the first—much as the benighted traveller after the will-o'-the-wisp. He may not lay hands on her, because you cannot conquer her wildness, nor impose your will upon her, or teach her good behaviour. He may not apply the "dead formalism of Art" to her, for "Nature abhors lines." Hence his mimicry can never rise above Nature. Indeed, if it remains faithful to the negative opinions of its practitioners, landscape-gardening will never construct any system of device. It has no creed, if you except that sole article of its faith, "I believe in the non-geometrical garden." A monumental style is an impossibility while it eschews all features that make for state and magnificence and symmetry; a little park scenery, much grass, curved shrubberies, the "laboured littleness" of emphasised specimen plants—the hardy ones dotted about in various parts—wriggling paths, flower-borders, or beds of shapes that imply that they are the offspring of bad dreams, and its tale of effects is told. But as for "fine gardening," that was given up long ago as a bad job! The spirit of Walpole's objections to the heroic enterprise of the old-fashioned garden still holds the "landscape-gardener" in check. "I should hardly advise any of those attempts," says Walpole; "they are adventures of too hard achievement for any common hands."

It is not so much at what he finds in the landscape gardener's creations that the architect demurs, but at what he misses. It is not so much at what the landscape-gardener recommends that the architect objects, as at what moving in his own little orbit he wilfully shuts out, basing his opposition to tradition upon such an ex parte view of the matter as this—"There are really two styles, one strait-laced, mechanical, with much wall and stone, or it may be gravel, with much also of such geometry as the designer of wall-papers excels in—often poorer than that, with an immoderate supply of spouting water, and with trees in tubs as an accompaniment, and, perhaps, griffins and endless plaster-work, and sculpture of the poorer sort." Why "poorer"? "The other, with right desire, though often awkwardly (!) accepting Nature as a guide, and endeavouring to illustrate in our gardens, so far as convenience and knowledge will permit, her many treasures of the world of flowers" ("English Flower Garden"). How sweetly doth bunkum commend itself!

It is not that the architect is small-minded enough to cavil at the landscape-gardener's right to display his taste by his own methods, but that he strikes for the same right for himself. It is not that he would rob the landscape-gardener of the pleasure of expressing his own views as persuasively as he can, but that he resents that air of superiority which the other puts on as he bans the comely types and garnered sweetness of old England's garden, that he accents the proscription of the ways of interpreting Nature that have won the sanction of lovers of Art and Nature of all generations of our forefathers, and this from a School whose prerogative dates no farther back than the discovery of the well-meaning, clumsy, now dethroned kitchen-gardener, known a short century since as "the immortal Brown." There is no reviewer so keen as Time!

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CHAPTER VI.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING.[37]

"Nothing is more the Child of Art than a Garden."

Sir Walter Scott.

"For every Garden," says Sir William Temple, "four things are to be provided—Flowers, Fruit, Shade, and Water, and whoever lays out a garden without these, must not pretend it in any perfection. Nature should not be forced; great sums may be thrown away without Effect or Honour, if there want sense in proportion to this." Briefly, the old master's charge is this: "Have common-sense; follow Nature."

Following upon these lines, the gardener's first duty in laying out the grounds to a house is, to study the site, and not only that part of it upon which the house immediately stands, but the whole site, its aspect, character, soil, contour, sectional lines, trees, &c. Common-sense, Economy, Nature, Art, alike dictate this. There is an individual character to every plot of land, as to every human face in a crowd; and that man is not wise who, to suit preferences for any given style of garden, or with a view to copying a design from another place, will ignore the characteristics of the site at his disposal.

Equally unwise will he be to follow that school of gardening that makes chaos before it sets about to make order. Features that are based upon, or that grow out of the natural formation of the ground, will not only look better than the created features, but be more to the credit of the gardener, if successful, and will save expense.

The ground throughout should be so handled that every natural good point, every tree, mound, declivity, stream, or quarry, or other chance feature, shall be turned to good account, and its consequence heightened, avoiding the error of giving the thing mock importance, by planting, digging, lowering declivities, raising prominences, planting dark-foliaged trees to intensify the receding parts, forming terraces on the slope, or adding other architectural features as may be advisable to connect the garden with the house which is its raison d'être, and the building with the landscape.

What folly to throw down undulations in order to produce a commonplace level, or to throw up hills, or make rocks, lakes, and waterfalls should the site happen to be level! What folly to make a standing piece of water imitate the curves of a winding river that has no existence, to throw a bridge over it near its termination, so as to close the vista and suggest the continuation of the water beyond! Nay, what need of artificial lakes at all if there be a running stream hard by?[38]

It is of the utmost importance that Art and Nature should be linked together, alike in the near neighbourhood of the house, and in its far prospect, so that the scene as it meets the eye, whether at a distance or near, should present a picture of a simple whole, in which each item should take its part without disturbing the individual expression of the ground.

To attain this result, it is essential that the ground immediately about the house should be devoted to symmetrical planning, and to distinctly ornamental treatment; and the symmetry should break away by easy stages from the dressed to the undressed parts, and so on to the open country, beginning with wilder effects upon the country-boundaries of the place, and more careful and intricate effects as the house is approached. Upon the attainment of this appearance of graduated formality much depends. One knows houses that are well enough in their way, that yet figure as absolute blots upon God's landscape, and that make a man writhe as at false notes in music, and all because due regard has not been paid to this particular. By exercise of forethought in this matter, the house and garden would have been linked to the site, and the site to the landscape; as it is, you wish the house at Jericho![39]

As the point of access to a house from the public road and the route to be taken afterwards not infrequently determines the position of the house upon the site, it may be well to speak of the Approach first. In planning the ground, care will be taken that the approach shall both look well of itself and afford convenient access to the house and its appurtenances, not forgetting the importance of giving to the visitor a pleasing impression of the house as he drives up.

In Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the usual form of approach was the straight avenue, instances of which are still to be seen at Montacute, Brympton, and Burleigh.[40] The road points direct to the house, as evidence that in the minds of the old architects the house was, as it were, the pivot round which the attached territory and the garden in all its parts radiated; and the road ends, next the house, in a quadrangle or forecourt, which has either an open balustrade or high hedge, and in the centre of the court is a grass plot enlivened by statue or fountain or sundial. And it is worthy of note that they who prefer a road that winds to the very door of a house on the plea of its naturalness make a great mistake; they forget that the winding road is no whit less artificial than the straight one.

The choice of avenue or other type of approach will mainly depend upon the character and situation of the house, its style and quality. Repton truly observes that when generally adopted the avenue reduces all houses to the same landscape—"if looking up a straight line, between two green walls, deserves the name of a landscape." He states his objections to avenues thus—"If at the end of a long avenue be placed an obelisk or temple, or any other eye-trap, ignorance or childhood alone will be caught and pleased by it; the eye of taste or experience hates compulsion, and turns away with disgust from every artificial means of attracting its notice; for this reason an avenue is most pleasing which, like that at Langley Park, climbs up a hill, and passing over the summit, leaves the fancy to conceive its termination."

The very dignity of an avenue seems to demand that there shall be something worthy of this procession of trees at its end, and if the house to which this feature is applied be unworthy, a sense of disappointment ensues. Provided, however, that the house be worthy of this dignity, and that its introduction does not mar the view, or dismember the ground, an avenue is both an artistic and convenient approach.

Should circumstances not admit of the use of an avenue, the drive should be as direct as may well be, and if curved, there should be some clear and obvious justification for the curve or divergence; it should be clear that the road is diverted to obtain a glimpse of open country that would otherwise be missed, or that a steep hill or awkward dip is thus avoided. The irregularity in the line of the road should not, however, be the occasion of any break in the gradient of the road, which should be continuously even throughout. In this matter of planning roads, common sense, as well as artistic sense, should be satisfied; there should be no straining after pompous effects. Except in cases where the house is near to the public road, the drive should not run parallel to the road for the mere sake of gaining a pretentious effect. Nor should the road overlook the garden, a point that touches the comfort both of residents and visitors; and for the same reason the entrance to the garden should not be from the drive, but from the house.

The gradient recommended by Mr Milner,[41] to whose skilled experience I am indebted for many practical suggestions, is 1 in 14. The width of a drive is determined by the relative importance of the route. Thus, a drive to the principal entrance of the house should be from 14 to 18 ft., while that to the stables or offices 10 ft. Walks should not be less than 6 ft. wide. The width of a grand avenue should be 50 ft, and "the trees may be preferably Elm, Beech, Oak, Chestnut, and they should not be planted nearer in procession than 40 ft., unless they be planted at intervals of half that distance for the purpose of destroying alternate trees, as their growth makes the removal necessary."

The entrance-gates should not be visible from the mansion, Repton says, unless it opens into a courtyard. As to their position, the gates may be formed at the junction of two roads, or where a cross-road comes on to the main road, or where the gates are sufficiently back from the public road to allow a carriage to stand clear. The gates, as well as the lodge, should be at right angles to the drive, and belong to it, not to the public road. Where the house and estate are of moderate size, architectural, rather than "rustic," simplicity best suits the character of the lodge. It is desirable, remarks Mr Milner, to place the entrance, if it can be managed, at the foot of a hill or rise in the public road, and not part of the way up an ascent, or at the top of it.

If possible, the house should stand on a platform or terraced eminence, so as to give the appearance of being well above ground; or it should be on a knoll where a view may be had. The ground-level of the house should be of the right height to command the prospect. Should the architect be so fortunate as to obtain a site for his house where the ground rises steep and abrupt on one side of the house, he will get here a series of terraces, rock-gardens, a fernery, a rose-garden, &c. The ideal site for a house would have fine prospects to the south-east and to the south-west "The principal approach should be on the north-western face, the offices on the north-eastern side, the stables and kitchen-garden beyond. The pleasure-gardens should be on the south-eastern aspect, with a continuation towards the east; the south-western face might be open to the park" (Milner).

If it can be avoided, the house should not be placed where the ground slopes towards it—a treatment which suggests water draining into it—but if this position be for some sufficient reason inevitable, or should it be an old house with this defect that we are called to treat, then a good space should be excavated, at least of the level of the house, with a terrace-wall at the far end, on the original level of the site at that particular point. And as to the rest of the ground, Repton's sound advice is to plant up the heights so as to increase the effect of shelter and seclusion that the house naturally has, and introduce water, if available, at the low-level of the site. The air of seclusion that the low-lying situation gives to the house is thus intensified by crowning the heights with wood and setting water at the base of the slope.

The hanging-gardens at Clevedon Court afford a good example of what can be done by a judicious formation of ground where the house is situated near the base of a slope, and this example is none the less interesting for its general agreement with Lamb's "Blakesmoor"—its ample pleasure-garden "rising backwards from the house in triple terraces; ... the verdant quarters backwarder still, and stretching still beyond in old formality, the firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the centre."

Before dealing with the garden and its relation to the house it may be well to say a few words upon Planting. Trees are among the grandest and most ornamental effects of natural scenery; they help the charm of hill, plain, valley, and dale, and the changes in the colour of their foliage at the different seasons of the year give us perpetual delight. One of the most important elements in ornamental gardens is the dividing up and diversifying a given area by plantations, by grouping of trees to form retired glades, open lawns, shaded alleys, and well-selected margins of woods; and, if this be skilfully done, an impression of variety and extent will be produced beyond the belief of the uninitiated who has seen the bare site before it was planted.

To speak generally, there should be no need of apology for applying the most subtle art in the disposal of trees and shrubs, and in the formation of the ground to receive them. "All Art," as Loudon truly says (speaking upon this very point), "to be acknowledged as Art, must be avowed." This is the case in the fine arts—there is no attempt to conceal art in music, poetry, painting, or sculpture, none in architecture, and none in geometrical-gardening.

In modern landscape-gardening, practised as a fine art, many of the more important beauties and effects produced by the artist depend on the use he makes of foreign trees and shrubs; and, personally, one is ready to forgive Brown much of his vile vandalism in old-fashioned gardens for the use he makes of cedars, pines, planes, gleditschias, robinias, deciduous cypress, and all the foreign hardy trees and shrubs that were then to his hand.

Loudon—every inch a fine gardener, true lineal descendant of Bacon in the art of gardening—recommends in his "Arboretum" (pp. 11, 12) the heading down of large trees of common species, and the grafting upon them foreign species of the same genus, as is done in orchard fruit-trees. Hawthorn hedges, for instance, are common everywhere; why not graft some of the rare and beautiful sorts of tree thorns, and intersperse common thorns between them? There are between twenty and thirty beautiful species and varieties of thorn in our nurseries. Every gardener can graft and bud. Or why should not scarlet oak and scarlet acer be grafted on common species of these genera along the margins of woods and plantations?

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In planting, the gardener has regard for character of foliage and tints, the nature of the soil, the undulations of ground and grouping, the amount of exposure. Small plantations of trees surrounded by a fence are the best expedients to form groups, says Repton, because trees planted singly seldom grow well. Good trees should not be encumbered by peddling bushes, but be treated as specimens, each having its separate mound. The mounds can be formed out of the hollowed pathways in the curves made between the groups. The dotting of trees over the ground or of specimen shrubs on a lawn is destructive of all breadth of effect. This is not to follow Nature, nor Art, for Art demands that each feature shall have relation to other features, and all to the general effect.

In planting trees the variety of height in their outline must be considered as much as the variety of their outline on plan; the prominent parts made high, the intervening bays kept low,[42] and this both in connection with the lie of the ground and the plant selected. Uniform curves, such as parts of circles or ovals, are not approved; better effects are obtained by forming long bays or recesses with forked tongues breaking forward irregularly, the turf running into the bays. Trees may serve to frame a particular view and frame a picture; and when well led up to the horizon will enhance the imaginative effect of a place: a beyond in any view implies somewhere to explore.

All trees grow more luxuriantly in valleys than on the hills, and on this account the tendency of tree-growth is to neutralise the difference in the rise and fall of the ground and to bring the tops of the trees level. But the perfection of planting is to get an effect approximating as near as may be to the charming undulations of the Forest of Dean and the New Forest. Care will be taken, then, not to plant the fast-growing, or tall-growing trees in the low-ground, but on the higher points, and even to add to the irregularity by clothing the natural peaks with silver fir, whose tall heads will increase the sense of height. The limes, planes, and elms will be mostly kept to the higher ground, bunches of Scotch fir will be placed here and there, and oaks and beeches grouped together, while the lower ground will be occupied by maples, crabs, thorns, alders, &c. "Fringe the edges of your wood with lines of horse-chestnut," says Viscount Lymington in his delightful and valuable article on "Vert and Venery"—"a mass in spring of blossom, and in autumn of colour; and under these chestnuts, and in nooks and corners, thrust in some laburnum, that it may push its showers of gold out to the light and over the fence."

As to the nature of the soil, and degree of exposure suitable to different forest-trees, the writer just quoted holds that, for exposure to the wind inland, the best trees for all soils are the beech, the Austrian pine, and the Scotch fir.

For exposure in hedgerows, the best tree to plant ordinarily is the elm. For exposure to frost, the Insignis pine, which will not, however, stand the frosts of the valley, but prefers high ground. For exposure to smoke, undoubtedly the best tree is the Western plane. The sycamore will stand better than most trees the smoke and chemical works of manufacturing towns. For sea-exposure, the best trees to plant are the goat willow and pineaster. Among the low-growing shrubs which stand sea-exposure well are mentioned the sea-buckthorn, the snow-berry, the evergreen barberry, and the German tamarisk; to which should be added the euonymus and the escallonia.

With regard to the nature of the soil, Lord Lymington says: "Strong clay produces the best oaks and the best silver fir. A deep loam is the most favourable soil for the growth of the Spanish chestnut and ash. The beech is the glorious weed of the chalk and down countries; the elm of the rich red sandstone valleys. Coniferous trees prefer land of a light sandy texture; ... but as many desire to plant conifers on other soils, I would mention that the following among others will grow on most soils, chalk included: the Abies excelsa, canadensis, magnifica, nobilis, and Pinsapo; the Pinus excelsa, insignis, and Laricio; the Cupressus Lawsoniana, erecta, viridis, and macrocarpa; the Salisburia adiantifolia, and the Wellingtonia. The most fast-growing in England of conifers is the Douglas fir.... It grows luxuriantly on the slopes of the hills, but will not stand exposure to the wind, and for that reason should always be planted in sheltered combes with other trees behind it.

"In moist and boggy land the spruce or the willow tribes succeed best."

"In high, poor, and very dry land, no tree thrives so well as the Scotch fir, the beech, and the sycamore."

Avoid the selfishness and false economy of planting an inferior class of fast-growing trees such as firs and larches and Lombardy poplars, on the ground that one would not live to get any pleasure out of woods of oaks and beech and chestnut. How frequently one sees tall, scraggy planes, or belts of naked, attenuated firs, where groups of oaks and elms and groves of chestnut might have stood with greater advantage.

Avoid the thoughtlessness and false economy of not thoroughly preparing the ground before planting. "Those that plant," says an old writer, "should make their ground fit for the trees before they set them, and not bury them in a hole like a dead dog; let them have good and fresh lodgings suitable to their quality, and good attendance also, to preserve them from their enemies till they are able to encounter them."

Avoid trees near a house; they tend to make it damp, and the garden which is near the house untidy. Writers upon planting have their own ideas as to the fitness of certain growths for a certain style of house. As regards the relation of trees to the house, if the building be of Gothic design with the piquant outline usual to the style, then trees of round shape form the best foil; if of Classic or Renascence design, then trees of vertical conic growth suit best. So, if the house be of stone, trees of dark foliage best meet the case; if of brick, trees of lighter foliage should prevail. As a backing to the horizontal line of a roof to an ordinary two-storey building, nothing looks better than the long stems of stone pines or Scotch firs; and pines are health-giving trees.

Never mark the outline of ground, nor the shape of groups of trees and shrubs with formal rows of bedding plants or other stiff edging, which is the almost universal practice of gardeners in the present day. This is a poor travesty of Bacon's garden, who only allows low things to grow naturally up to the edges.

From the artist's point of view, perhaps the most desirable quality to aim at in the distribution of garden space is that of breadth of effect—in other words, simplicity; and the larger the garden the more need does there seem for getting this quality. One may, in a manner, toy with a small garden. In the case of a large garden, where the owner in his greed for prettiness has carried things further than regulation-taste would allow, much may be done to subdue the assertiveness of a multiplicity of interesting objects by architectural adjuncts—broad terraces, well-defined lines, even a range of sentinel yews or clipt shrubs—things that are precise, grave, calm, and monotonous. Where such things are brought upon the scene, a certain spaciousness and amplitude of effect ensues as a matter of course.

One sees that the modern gardener, with his augmented list of specimen-plants of varied foliage, is far more apt to err in the direction of sensationalism than the gardener of old days who was exempt from many of our temptations. Add to this power of attaining sweetness and intricacy the artist's prone aspirations to work up to his lights and opportunities, and we have temptation which is seductiveness itself!

The garden at Highnam Court, dear to me for its signs and memories of my late accomplished friend, Mr T. Gambier Parry, is the perfectest modern garden I have ever seen. But here, if there be a fault, it is that Art has been allowed to blossom too profusely. The attention of the visitor is never allowed to drop, but is ever kept on the stretch. You are throughout too much led by the master's cunning hand. Every known bit of garden-artifice, every white lie of Art, every known variety of choice tree or shrub, or trick of garden-arrangement is set forth there. But somehow each thing strikes you as a little vainglorious—too sensible of its own importance. We go about in a sort of pre-Raphaelite frame of mind, where each seemly and beauteous feature has so much to say for itself that, in the delightfulness of the details, we are apt to forget that it is the first business of any work of Art to be a unit. There is nothing of single specimen, or group of intermingled variety, or adroit vista that we may miss and not be a loser; the only drawback is that we see what we are expected to see, what everyone else sees. Here is greenery of every hue; every metallic tint of silver, gold, copper, bronze is there; and old and new favourites take hands, and we feel that it is perfect; but the things blush in their conscious beauty—every prospect is best seen "there!" England has few such beautiful gardens as Highnam, and it has all the pathos of the touch of "a vanished hand," and ideals that have wider range now.

As to this matter of scenic effects, it is of course only fair to remember that a garden is a place meant not only for broad vision, but for minute scrutiny; and, specially near the house, intricacy is permissible. Yet the counsels of perfection would tell the artist to eschew such prettiness and multiplied beauties as trench upon broad dignity. Sweetness is not good everywhere. Variations in plant-life that are over-enforced, like variations in music, may be inferior to the simple theme. A commonplace house, with well-disposed grounds, flower-beds in the right place, a well-planted lawn, may please longer than a fine pile where is ostentation and unrelieved artifice.

Of lawns. Everything in a garden, we have said, has its first original in primal Nature: a garden is made up of wild things that are tamed. The old masters fully realised this. They sucked out the honey of wild things without carrying refinement too far before they sipped it; and in garnering for their House Beautiful the rustic flavour is left so far as was compatible with the requirements of Art—"as much as may be to a natural wildness." And it were well for us to do the same in the treatment of a lawn, which is only the grassy, sun-chequered, woodland glade in, or between woods, in a wild country idealised.

A lawn is one of the delights of man. The "Teutonic races"—says Mr Charles Dudley Warner, in his large American way—"The Teutonic races all love turf; they emigrate in the line of its growth." Flower-beds breed cheerfulness, but they may at times be too gay for tired eyes and jaded minds; they may provoke admiration till they are provoking. But a garden-lawn is a vision of peace, and its tranquil grace is a boon of unspeakable value to people doomed to pass their working-hours in the hustle of city-life.

The question of planting and of lawn-making runs together, and Nature admonishes us how to set about this work. Every resource she offers should be met by the resources of Art: avoid what she avoids, accept and heighten what she gives. Nature in the wild avoids half-circles and ovals and uniform curves, and they are bad in the planted park, both for trees and greensward. Nature does not of herself dot the landscape over with spies sent out single-handed to show the nakedness of the land, but puts forth detachments that befriend each the other, the boldest and fittest first, in jagged outlines, leading the way, but not out of touch with the rest. And, since the modern landscape-gardener is nothing if not a naturalist, this is why one cannot see the consistency of so fine a master as Mr Marnock, when he dots his lawns over with straggling specimens. (See the model garden, by Mr Marnock in "The English Flower-Garden," p. xxi, described thus—"Here the foreground is a sloping lawn; the flowers are mostly arranged near the kitchen garden, partly shown to right; the hardy ones grouped and scattered in various positions near, or within good view of, the one bold walk which sweeps round the ground.")

A garden is ground knit up artistically; ground which has been the field of artistic enterprise; ground which expresses the feeling of beauty and which absorbs qualities which man has discovered in the woodland world. And the qualities in Nature which may well find room in a garden are peace, variety, animation. A good sweep of lawn is a peaceful object, but see that the view is not impeded with the modern's sprawling pell-mell beds. And in the anxiety to make the most of your ground, do not spoil a distant prospect. Remember, too, that a lawn requires a good depth of soil, or it will look parched in the hot weather.

And since a lawn is so delightful a thing, beware lest your admiration of it lead you to swamp your whole ground with grass even to carrying it up to the house itself. "Nothing is more a child of Art than a garden," says Sir Walter, and he was competent to judge. If only out of compliment to your architect and to the formal angularities of his building, let the ground immediately about the house be of an ornamental dressed character.

Avoid the misplaced rusticity of the fashionable landscape-gardener, who with his Nebuchadnezzar tastes would turn everything into grass, would cart away the terrace and all its adjuncts, do away with all flowers, and "lawn your hundred good acres of wheat," as Repton says, if you will only let him, and if you have them.

In his devotion to grass, his eagerness to display the measure of his art in the curves of shrubberies and the arrangement of specimen plants that strut across your lawn or dot it over as the Sunday scholars do the croft when they come for their annual treat, he quite forgets the flowers—forgets the old intent of a garden as the House Beautiful of the civilised world—the place for nature-rapture, colour-pageantry, and sweet odours. "Here the foreground is a sloping lawn; the flowers are mostly arranged near the kitchen garden." Anywhere, anywhere out of the way! Or if admitted at all into view of the house, it shall be with little limited privileges, and the stern injunction—

"If you speak you must not show your face,
Or if you show your face you must not speak."

So much for the garden-craft of the best modern landscape-gardener and its relation to flowers. If this be the garden of the "Gardenesque" style, as it is proudly called, I personally prefer the garden without the style.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING—(continued.)

"I cannot think Nature is so spent and decayed that she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, like herself; and when she collects her strength is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies; she is not."—Ben Jonson.

The old-fashioned country house has, almost invariably, a garden that curtseys to the house, with its formal lines, its terraces, and beds of geometrical patterns.

But to the ordinary Landscape-gardener the terrace is as much anathema as the "Kist o' Whistles" to the Scotch Puritan! So able and distinguished a gardener as Mr Robinson, while not absolutely forbidding any architectural accessories or geometrical arrangement, is for ever girding at them. The worst thing that can be done with a true garden, he says ("The English Flower Garden," p. ii), "is to introduce any feature which, unlike the materials of our world-designer, never changes. There are positions, it is true, where the intrusion of architecture and embankment into the garden is justifiable; nay, now and then, even necessary."

If one is to promulgate opinions that shall run counter to the wisdom of the whole civilised world, it is, of course, well that they should be pronounced with the air of a Moses freshly come down from the Mount, with the tables of the law in his hands. And there is more of it. "There is no code of taste resting on any solid foundation which proves that garden or park should have any extensive stonework or geometrical arrangement.... Let us, then, use as few oil-cloth or carpet patterns and as little stonework as possible in our gardens. The style is in doubtful taste in climates and positions more suited to it than that of England, but he who would adopt it in the present day is an enemy to every true interest of the garden" (p. vi).

So much for the "deadly formalism" of an old-fashioned garden in our author's eyes! But, as Horace Walpole might say, "it is not peculiar to Mr Robinson to think in that manner." It is the way of the landscape-gardener to monopolise to himself all the right principles of gardening; he is the angel of the garden who protects its true interests; all other moods than his are low, all figures other than his are symbols of errors, all dealings with Nature or with "the materials of our world-designer" other than his are spurious. For the colonies I can imagine no fitter doctrines than our author's, but not for an old land like ours, and for methods that have the approval of men like Bacon, Temple, More, Evelyn, Sir Joshua, Sir Walter, Elia, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Morris, and Jefferies. And, even in the colonies, they might demand to see "the code of taste resting on any solid foundation which proves" that you shall have any garden or park at all!

"If I am to have a system at all," says the author of "The Flower Garden" (Murray, 1852), whose broad-minded views declare him to be an amateur, "give me the good old system of terraces and angled walks, the clipt yew hedges, against whose dark and rich verdure the bright old-fashioned flowers glittered in the sun." Or again: "Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcombical times, that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of gardening is the vainest.... The real beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts after rarity. If we review the various styles that have prevailed in England from the knotted gardens of Elizabeth ... to the landscape fashion of the present day, we shall have little reason to pride ourselves on the advance which national taste has made upon the earliest efforts in this department" ("The Praise of Gardens," p. 270).

"Large or small," says Mr W. Morris, "the garden should look both orderly and rich. It should be well fenced from the outer world. It should by no means imitate either the wilfulness or the wildness of Nature, but should look like a thing never seen except near a house" ("Hopes and Fears").

The whole point of the matter is, however, perhaps best summed up in Hazlitt's remark, that there is a pleasure in Art which none but artists feel. And why this sudden respect for "the materials of our world-designer," when we may ask in Repton's words "why this art has been called Landscape-gardening, perhaps he who gave the title may explain. I see no reason, unless it be the efficacy which it has shown in destroying landscapes, in which indeed it is infallible!" But, setting aside the transparent shallowness of such a plea against the use of Art in a garden, it argues little for the scheme of effects to leave "nothing to impede the view of the house or its windows but a refreshing carpet of grass." To pitch your house down upon the grass with no architectural accessories about it, to link it to the soil, is to vulgarise it, to rob it of importance, to give it the look of a pastoral farm, green to the door-step. To bring Nature up to the windows of your house, with a scorn of art-sweetness, is not only to betray your own deadness to form, but to cause a sense of unexpected blankness in the visitor's mind on leaving the well-appointed interior of an English home. As the house is an Art-production, so is the garden that surrounds it, and there is no code of taste that I know of which would prove that Art is more reprehensible in the garden than in the house.

But to return. The old-fashioned country house had its terraces. These terraces are not mere narrow slopes of turf, such as now-a-days too often answer to the term, but they are of solid masonry with balustrades or open-work that give an agreeable variety of light and shade, and impart an air of importance and of altitude to the house that would be lacking if the terrace were not there.

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