JUST before the breaking forth of the French Revolution, the Abbé de Lille composed a poem in four cantos, entitled Les Jardins, in which he enthusiastically urged the abandonment of all formality in the laying out of a garden, and the adoption of the new English style of irregularity.
"Avant de planter, avant que du terrain
Votre béche imprudente entame le sein,
Pour donnez aux jardins une forme plus pure,
Observez, connoissez, imitez la nature."
An agreeable wildness—that was what was to be sought. The Revolution came in, and hacked the gardens about, and reduced them all to the state of wildness.
What the Abbé de Lille wrote against was the artificiality of the garden arrangement that had been in vogue till then. Horace Walpole had already written in the same strain. A rage had set in in England for remodelling the gardens, and the new fashion was called "English gardening."
Pliny the younger, in his delightful letters, speaks of his gardens. As his Laurentine villa was his winter retreat, it is not surprising that the gardens there take no prominent part of his account. All he says of them is, that the gestatio, or exercise ground, surrounded the garden, and was bounded by a box-hedge; where the box had perished, there were planted tufts of rosemary. He mentions his vine-walk and his trees, mostly mulberry and fig, as the soil was unsuited for other trees. On his Tuscan villa he is more diffuse; the garden takes up a good part of the description. He tells of the strange shapes into which his box-trees were clipped, his slopes, his terraces, shrubs methodically trimmed, a marble basin, fountain, a cascade, bay-trees alternating with plane-trees, a long straight walk, from which branched off others hedged by apple-trees in espalier, and by box, and ornamented with obelisks. Something like a rural view was, indeed, contrived amidst so much artificiality, but was speedily forgotten amidst the stiff lines of box and the trimmed cypresses.
In the paintings of Herculaneum we see the representations of gardens; they are square enclosures, formed by trellis-work and espaliers, and regularly ornamented with vases, fountains, and statues, elegantly symmetrical. Now this arrangement of a garden continued in Italy. It never changed, and the villa gardens in and about Rome to this day reproduce the plans and character of those that flourished there in the classic age.