Drummond Castle. Example of beautiful garden in Scotland, in position requiring terracing
He assumes that landscape gardeners all follow artistic ways, and that only architects make terraces; whereas the greatest sinners in this respect have been landscape gardeners—Nesfield and Paxton. He has paid so little attention to the subject, that he says that the landscape gardener's only notion is to put Grass all around the house! It does not even occur to him that there may be Grass on one side of a house and gardens of various sorts at the others, as at Goodwood, Shrubland, Knole, and that a house may have at each side a different expression of landscape gardening!
He takes the English Flower Garden as the expression of landscape gardening practice; whereas the book, in all the parts that treat of design, is a protest against the formation by landscape gardeners of costly things which have nothing to do with gardening and nothing to do with true architecture. The good architect is satisfied with building a beautiful house, and that we are all the happier for. But what we have to deplore is that men who are not really architects, who are not gardeners, should cover the earth with rubbish like the Crystal Palace basins, the thing at the top of the Serpentine, and the Grand Trianon at Versailles.
Here is a specimen of Mr. Sedding's knowledge of the landscape art.
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!).
Madresfield. Example of modern English garden
If he had even taken the trouble to see a good garden laid out by Mr. Marnock or anybody worthy of the name of landscape gardener, he would find that they knew the use of the terrace very well. If he had taken the trouble to see one of my own gardens, he would find beds quite as formal, but not so frivolous as those described in the older books, and lines simple and straight as they can be. Where Barry left room for a dozen flowers at Shrubland I put one hundred; so much for the "bareness"!
On page 180 he says:—