A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Now, Dorothy and I had simply been garden-lovers—I mean lovers of gardens, though I don't take back the original phrase. We had never been garden enthusiasts. We had gone through the Borghese, the Villa d'Este, the Vatican, the bowers behind the Pitti and the Uffizi, and all the rest of the show-places of Italy and the French Riviera—we had spent delightful days at every garden-island of the Caribbean, and had gone on to the plateaus of South America, where every prospect pleases and there is a blaze of flowers beneath the giant yuccas—we had even explored Kew together, and we had lived within a stone's throw of Holland House and the painters' pleasaunces of Melbury Road, but with all we had remained content to think of gardens without making them any important part of our life. And this being so, I now see how arrogant was that act of mine in binding myself down to a transaction with as far-reaching consequences to me as that of Dr. Faustus entailed to him.

Now I acknowledge that when I looked out over the green lawn and thought of all that I had let myself in for, I felt anything but arrogant. The destruction of a lawn is, like the state of matrimony in the Church Service, an act not to be lightly entered into; and I think I might have laid away all that stone-work which had come to me, until I should become more certain of myself—that is how a good many people think within a week or two of marriage—if I had not, with those doubts hanging over me, wandered away from the lawn and within sight of the straggling orchard with its rows of ill-planted plums and apples that had plainly borne nothing but leaves for many years. They were becoming an eye-sore to me, and the thought came in a flash:—

“This is the place for a lawn. Why not root up these unprofitable and uninteresting things and lay down the space in grass?”

Why not, indeed? The more I thought over the matter the more reconciled I became to the transformation of the house lawn. I felt as I fancy the father of a well-beloved daughter must feel when she tells him that she has promised to marry the son of the house at the other side of his paddock. He is reconciled to the idea of parting with her by the reflection that she will still be living beyond the fence, and that he will enjoy communion with her under altered conditions. That is the difference between parting with a person and parting from a person.

And now, when I looked at the house lawn, I saw that it had no business to be there. It was an element of incongruity. It made the house look as if it were built in the middle of a field. A field is all very well in its place, and a house is all very well in its place, but the place of the house is not in the middle of a field. It looks its worst there and the field looks its worst when the house is overlooking it.

I think that it is this impression of incongruity that has made what is called The Formal Garden a necessity of these days. We want a treatment that will take away from the abruptness of the mass of bricks and mortar rising straight up from the simplest of Nature's elements. We want a hyphenated House-and-Garden which we can look on as one and indivisible, like the First French Republic.

In short, I think that the making of the Formal Garden is the marriage ceremony that unites the house to its site, “and the twain shall be one flesh.”

That is really the relative position of the two. I hold that there are scores of forms of garden that may be espoused to a house; and I am not sure that such a term as Formal is not misleading to a large number of people who think that Nature should begin the moment that one steps out of one's house, and that nothing in Nature is formal. I am not going to take on me any definition of the constituent elements of what is termed the Formal Garden, but I will take it on me to stand up against such people as would have us believe that the moment you enter a house you leave Nature outside. A house is as much a product of Nature as a woodland or a rabbit warren or a lawn. The original house of that product of Nature known as man was that product of Nature known as a cave. For thousands of years before he got into his cave he had made his abode in the woodland. It was when he found he could do better than hang on to his bough and, with his toes, take the eggs out of whatever nests he could get at, that he made the cave his dwelling; and thousands of years later he found that it was more convenient to build up the clay into the shape of a cave than to scoop out the hillside when he wanted an addition to the dwelling provided for him in the hollows made by that natural incident known as a landslide. But the dwelling-house of to-day is nothing more than a cave built up instead of scooped out. Whether made of brick, stone, or clay—all products of Nature—it is fundamentally the same as the primeval cave dwelling; just as a Corinthian column is fundamentally identical with the palm-tree which primeval man brought into his service when he wished to construct a dwelling dependent of the forest of his pendulous ancestors. The rabbit is at present in the stage of development of the men who scooped out their dwellings; the beaver is in the stage of development of the men who gave up scooping and took to building; and will any one suggest that a rabbit warren or a beaver village is not Nature?

Sir R. Blomfield, in his book to which I have alluded, will not have this at all. “The building,” he says, “cannot resemble anything in Nature, unless you are content with a mud hut and cover it with grass.” That may be true enough; but great architect that he is, he would have shown himself more faithful to his profession if he had been more careful about his foundations. If he goes a little deeper into the matter he will find that man has not yet been civilised or “architected” out of the impressions left upon him by his thousands of years of cave-dwelling, any more than he has been out of his arboreal experiences of as many thousand years. While, as a boy, he retains vividly those impressions of his ancestors which gradually wear off—though never so completely as to leave no trace behind them—he cannot be restrained from climbing trees and enjoying the motion of a swing; and his chief employment when left to his own devices is scooping out a cave in a sand-bank. For the first ten or fifteen years of his life a man is in his instincts many thousand years nearer to his prehistoric relations than he is when he is twenty; after that the inherited impressions become blurred, but never wholly wiped out. He is still stirred to the deepest depths of his nature by the long tresses of a woman, just as was his early parent, who knew that he had to depend on such long tresses to drag the female on whom he had set his heart to his cave.

Scores of examples could be given of the retention of these inherited instincts; but many of them are in more than one sense of the phrase, “far-fetched.” When, however, we know that the architectural design which finds almost universal favour is that of the column or the pilaster—which is little more than the palm-tree of the Oriental forest of many thousand years ago—I chink we are justified in assuming that we have not yet quite lost sight of the fact that our dwellings are most acceptable when they retain such elements as are congenial with their ancient homes, which homes were undoubtedly incidents in the natural landscape.