If box and yew are clipped into the shape of kerb-stones and stone walls, such trees may just as well be clipped into the shape of domes and pyramids and other architectural things; but not, I think, into the shape of birds and beasts that might fly off or walk away. It is only a bad joke to make a plant look like an animal, and even good jokes pall when they take twenty years to make and go on for a century. I like these things in other people’s gardens where I see them only now and then, but do not want them in my own where I should see them every day.
In the Hall House garden I established two grass walks, crossing one another at right-angles, with hedges ten feet high and four feet thick made of clipped cypress and looking as solid as walls. I not only like the look of them, but find them very convenient—in one or other of those walks I can always be out of the sun or out of the wind, if either is too strong. The cypress is Cupressus Macrocarpa, which grows very quickly here; and if anybody wants to make a hedge of it, I should advise him to keep his hedge a little narrower at the top than at the base. With a very slight slope of the sides the rain runs down to the lowest twigs; but if the sides are bolt upright, the lowest twigs dry up and wither away, leaving an ugly hollow underneath.
A formal garden may be made to look as ugly as anything in Holland when the tulips are in bloom—five hundred tulips in a bed, all at the same distance from each other, and all of the same colour and size. Enamelled iron would be better than real flowers there, as it would give the full effect at which those gardeners aim. If formality demands entire beds of flowers of one kind, these might at least be flowers of varied colour and irregular growth. I use begonias for my box-edged beds here—double, single, frilled, all mixed together, scarlet, crimson, coral, salmon, orange, yellow, white—and (in my eyes) the beds have unity enough without too much formality. But all begonias are ungainly things; and ‘a blaze of colour’ generally means a mass of flowers that have few merits of their own. There are plenty of flowers worth growing for their grandeur or their grace; but people fill their gardens up with other sorts, just as they fill their houses with the books ‘without which no gentleman’s library would be complete.’ They merely grow these plants because most people grow them.
If there is to be a ‘formal’ garden, it should be next the house, as the house itself is all right-angles and straight lines that harmonize with walls of yew or cypress and kerb-stones of box. Conversely, the ‘wild’ garden should be far away; and the usual notion is that ‘landscape’ gardening covers the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘wild.’ I have a notion of my own that landscape gardening is like sitting between two stools. No doubt, a landscape painter may improve a landscape by omitting things that spoil the view or putting them in where they look right; and a landscape gardener can really cut things down or root them up and plant them somewhere else. He may thereby improve a garden that was naturally wild; but when he plans a ‘landscape’ garden, he usually gives it too much formality for nature and not enough for art.
In looking at landscapes by great painters, such as Claude Lorraine, you sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong, and then it dawns upon you that the hills and dales and rocks and streams defy the laws of Nature. In his Observations on Modern Gardening, which first came out in 1770, Whately treats real landscape in the same capricious way; and the question is, how far such licence is allowable. There is an engraving of Turner’s picture of the Temeraire, with some of the mistakes corrected. The sun is still setting in the east, but the tug’s mast is forward of the funnel, not abaft of it, and the Temeraire’s foremast looks taller than her mainmast, as it really would, seen from that point of view. But these corrections spoil the composition, with its series of ascending heights from the tug’s funnel to her mast and the foremast and the mainmast of the Temeraire. Turner understood ships very well, and knew what he was doing. But the Claudes and Whatelys did not understand geology, and blundered in an aimless way.
Whately declares that every ‘landskip’ is composed of ground, wood, water, rocks and buildings. In a garden “every species of architecture may be admitted, from the Grecian down to the Chinese”; but in a wider prospect there should be “no Grecian temples, no Turkish mosques, no Egyptian obelisks or pyramids,” though there may be “the semblance of an ancient British monument,” pp. 119, 120, ed. 1770. As for its construction, “the materials might be brick, or even timber plaistered over, if stone could not easily be procured: whatever they were, the fallacy would not be discernible.” It tempts me to construct a lath-and-plaster Stonehenge here.
On one point I agree with him, p. 159, “a chearful look-out from the windows is all that the proprietor desires: he is more sensible to the charms of the greater prospects, if he sees them only occasionally, and they do not become insipid by being familiar.” Nor is it prudent to rely too much upon a distant view. In a flat country you plant a belt of trees around your house and don’t care what your neighbours do: you are monarch of all you survey. But in a hilly country, such as this, you are at your neighbours’ mercy, unless you have a very large estate. Some neighbour may quite spoil your view by starting building or cutting timber or opening a mine a mile or two away. And you cannot plant him out. If you plant a tree to hide an eyesore, it hides it only from one point of view, and from other points it hides things you may wish to see.
Clipped hedges of yew and cypress look well almost anywhere, but best near dark green trees, cedar, pine, or fir. Evergreens are always better by themselves away from trees that shed their leaves, unless such trees are masked. I think the younger Pliny was right in growing ivy on his plane trees, and letting it run out along the branches and reach across from tree to tree, Epistolæ, V. 6. 32. He liked the dark green of the ivy with his bay trees and his clipped box bushes below, although he knew the ivy would ultimately kill the planes.
Planes were then the fashionable trees, as they gave the pleasantest shade. They were not introduced into Italy until about 400 B.C., and were not easily grown. The elder Pliny says that there were people who watered theirs with wine, Historia naturalis, XII. 4 (8). I never went as far as that with any tree, nor did my grandfather, although my grandmother always made a point of watering the myrtle with cold tea. No doubt, all plants have their appropriate food. I sometimes get the parings off the hoofs when a horse is being shod, and then I give my olive trees a feed.
I respect the elder Pliny as a man—his nephew has told us how his steady snoring could be heard amidst the thunders of Vesuvius, when everybody else was scared, Epistolæ, VI. 16. 13—but as an author he was not at his best. His nephew has described his ways: how he gave every moment of spare time to reading books or having books read to him, always making notes and extracts as he went along, Epistolæ, III. 5. But he did not always take things down correctly. Theophrastos says that the plane tree was rare (spanian) in Italy, Historia plantarum, IV. 5. 6, and Pliny has turned this into plane trees in Italy and Spain, Historia naturalis, XII. 3 (7). More than half of what he says of trees is copied out of Theophrastos, but he has interspersed it with his snippets out of other authors who were not always speaking of the same varieties. And thus he has created things that never have existed and could not possibly exist. At the end of an impossible tale, Gargantua, I. 6, Rabelais very justly says that after all he wasn’t as big a liar as Pliny, “et toutesfoys ie ne suis poinct menteur tant asseuré comme il a esté.”