ON THE MAKING OF GARDENS 
 
 SIR GEORGE SITWELL 
 
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 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
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 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 SB 472.S62 1909 
 
 An essay on the making of gardens; being 
 
 3 1924 016 401 170 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016401170 
 
ON THE MAKING OF GARDENS 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE 
 MAKING OF GARDENS 
 
 BEING 
 
 A STUDY OF OLD ITALIAN GARDENS, OF THE 
 
 NATURE OF BEAUTY, AND THE PRINCIPLES 
 
 INVOLVED IN GARDEN DESIGN 
 
 SIR GEORGE, SITWELL, Baronet 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 1909 
 5 
 
PRINTED BV 
 
 HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LV., 
 
 LONDON AND AYLESBURY. 
 
TO 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 THIS ESSAY IS DEDICATED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 To many excellent people who take a gloomy 
 view of life, studies of art and beauty seem 
 to be but trifling ; I must therefore urge as 
 an excuse for this essay that the greater part 
 of it was written during a period of broken 
 health, when slowly recovering from the effects 
 of over-work. Further, I would plead that a 
 serious purpose lies behind it, namely, that 
 of influencing the newly recovered art of 
 garden design. The revival of garden-craft 
 is the work of English architects, ]oaove par- 
 ticularly of Sedding, R. Blomfield and F. 
 Inigo Thomas. But still, as in the days of 
 Fjmes Moryson, the formal garden in England 
 falls short of the great examples of the ItaUan 
 Renaissance ; it is seldom related as it should 
 be to the surrounding scenery ; it is often 
 wanting in repose and nearly always in 
 imagination. During the last few years several 
 sumptuous volumes have appeared illustrating 
 the old gardens of Italy, yet except for a 
 few hints given by Mrs. Wharton in her most 
 valuable and charming book, little or nothing 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 has been said about principles. If the world 
 is to make great gardens again, we must both 
 discover and apply in the changed circum- 
 stances of modern life the principles which 
 guided the garden-makers of the Renaissance, 
 and must be ready to learn all that science 
 can teach us concerning the laws of artistic 
 presentment. 
 
 I intended to pubhsh with this essay another 
 on the history of the garden during the Dark 
 Ages, but here again Time, against whom I 
 am beginning to have serious grounds of 
 complaint, has been too much for me. 
 However, so far as matter is concerned 
 it is complete, and I hope to issue it in the 
 autumn. 
 
 Every one who has travelled in Italy 
 appreciates the courtesy and kindness shown 
 by Italians to strangers of all nationalities — 
 perhaps one would not be wrong in saying 
 more especially to Englishmen. Since I first 
 began in the early 'nineties to study old Italian 
 gardens I have visited more than two hundred 
 in all parts of the country, and I cannot 
 sufficiently express my thanks to the owners. 
 
 George R. Sitwell. 
 
 May, 1909. 
 
ON THE MAKING OF 
 GARDENS 
 
 Time is a wayward traveller, who sometimes 
 rides post-haste through thick and thin, some- 
 times loiters on the road or falls asleep in the 
 saddle, so that, fearing he is engulfed, we are 
 half inclined to send with ropes and lanterns 
 to drag him out of the deep miry ways : it is 
 therefore not surprising if now and again the 
 events of a century are crowded into the annals 
 of one brief hfetime. Nowhere is this headlong 
 rush of Time more noticeable than in the sixty 
 years which elapsed between the publication 
 of Bacon's essay on gardens in 1625 and that of 
 Sir William Temple in the last year of King 
 Charles the Second. The charm of both writers 
 will be felt by every one, yet so different is the 
 spirit and outlook that we seem to have passed 
 into another world. The last wave of the great 
 Renaissance impulse spends itself and dies in 
 Bacon : in Temple, great events often taking 
 their rise in a garden, we have the first sugges- 
 
 I 
 
2 ON GARDENS 
 
 tion of a return to nature and freedom, the first 
 whisper of rebellion, the first breath of revolu- 
 tion. There is another strange difference be- 
 tween the two essays. Bacon, while content to 
 work within the four-square Umits which sense, 
 moderation, and experience have imposed, is 
 pregnant in every sentence with suggestion, 
 fancy, imagination : Sir William is a cold 
 formalist intent on growing better peaches and 
 nectarines than his neighbours, and has nothing 
 to say which his best friend could describe as 
 imaginative, unless it be his reference to a Dutch 
 garden at the Cape of Good Hope, divided into 
 four parts, each planted with the trees, flowers, 
 and fruit peculiar to one quarter of the world ; 
 an idea on a par with those which have inspired 
 so many of our modern Memorials, and not, as 
 Sir William himself must have been aware, 
 belonging to a very high order of imagination. 
 In this there is something more than the 
 different genius of the two men, something more 
 than the baneful influence of Versailles. The 
 world itself has changed, the day of humanism 
 is over, new and narrower fetters are every- 
 where replacing the old. We have reached the 
 age of the Classical Decadence, when scholarship 
 was sinking into pedantry, when form and 
 correctness were more than fancy or freedom 
 and clever technique than serious intention or 
 high endeavour, when painting, architecture, 
 war, poetry, love, and manners had all been 
 
TiiE CLASSICAL DECADENCE 3 
 
 reduced to rules of practice and education had 
 come to be a knowledge of restraints. It was 
 not permissible to admire the barbarous Gothic, 
 nor the rugged efforts of untutored nature, nor 
 the work of the earlier poets and masters ; com- 
 merce and the care of an estate were vulgar, 
 and to think for oneself in the realm of philo- 
 sophy or religion was not only, as at present, a 
 misdemeanour, but actually a crime. Thus 
 it was that, thought and freedom being denied, 
 the fine gentlemen and radiant ladies whom we 
 see upon the canvases of Watteau, Hogarth, 
 and Longhi took to the more pardonable vices 
 of gambling and intrigue, to exquisite trifling 
 in porcelain and prints and jewels and enamels 
 and miniatures ; or drowned the illusions of 
 life in a fairy world of enchanted sound. Thus 
 it was that, hedged in on every side by formalism, 
 they grew weary of the silvery plash of the 
 fountain and the bass murmur of the stepped 
 cascade, of ordered bosquet, stiff canal and 
 sanded parterre, of groves like green chests set 
 upon poles, of smirking nymphs and leering 
 satyrs and fine vases full of nothing. The long 
 straight alleys seemed to them to be insipid, 
 the evergreen hedges to be unfeeUng ; they 
 hated the flower battalions which stood on 
 parade in platoons of pinks and regiments of 
 tuhps and armies of asters, the stage scenery 
 of box and turf and trellis which could not share 
 in the hopes of spring or the regrets of autumn, 
 
4 ON GARDENS 
 
 but was dead to all the music of the year. For 
 in the general decadence of the arts the garden 
 too had fallen upon evil days. Unbending 
 system had been the fault of the French, even 
 in the time of Montaigne, who notes that the 
 Italians " borrow an infinity of graces, not 
 known among us, from the very irregularity of 
 the surface " ; and in the last quarter of the 
 seventeenth century, when the sceptre of taste 
 and fashion passed at length from proud Italy 
 to gaudy Versailles, the evil was intensified by 
 Le Notre, who stole the formulas of garden- 
 making from Rome and Florence, but left the 
 poetry behind. 
 
 The long-drawn-out monotony of the new 
 style, which took no account of the genius of 
 the place, but sought everywhere to overwhelm 
 nature with mighty embankments and deep- 
 dug valleys and rivers turned from their courses, 
 with terrace heaped upon terrace, with groves 
 of up-springing fountains and forests of weU- 
 driUed trees, was bound to provoke a re- 
 action. But the revolution which followed is 
 not an isolated phenomenon : with the baroque 
 in architecture, the Chinese taste in decoration, 
 the freer forms of musical composition, the 
 Romantic movement in painting and literature, 
 it is part of a world's revolt against a formalism 
 which had become intolerable.^ At first the 
 
 ^ In 17 12, when Addison, stirred by descriptions of 
 travel in China, was proposing to introduce into the 
 
THE REVOLT AGAINST FORMALISM 5 
 
 English garden, the garden of nature and senti- 
 ment which Addison and Rousseau describe, 
 must have appeared by contrast as refreshing 
 as in these days of lawns and shrubberies a 
 walled enclosure is to us. In the parks attached 
 to the great houses, where oval lakes and 
 square islands were not unknown, there was 
 room for the new landscape art, whose great 
 achievement has been the management of 
 water and the grouping of trees. But as 
 under Louis XIV. the garden had encroached 
 upon the park, so now the park swept over 
 the garden, bringing the " one unending un- 
 dulating sweep " of the bare EngKsh lawn up 
 to the very vy^indows of the house. With the 
 Peace of 1762 the new fashion spread hke a 
 plague over Europe, destrojdng ever5Avhere the 
 historic and harmonious setting of hall and 
 palace and castle, scenes which the care and 
 love of bygone centuries had hallowed, which 
 should have been left to us to link one generation 
 with another. In its train came follies worse 
 than those which provoked the satire of Addison. 
 
 garden the " beautiful wildness of nature," Watteau was 
 already making it the subject of his pictures. Painting in 
 the great neglected gardens of the Luxembourg and Mont- 
 morency, he gives indeed the statues, stairways, and stately 
 hemicycles of the old regime, but the green irregular vistas 
 have no limit, and every trace of regularity in pathway or 
 vegetation has disappeared. In 1717 he produced L'Em- 
 barquement pour Cythire, " the first genuine painted poem 
 that Europe had seen since the golden days of the Venetian 
 Renaissance." 
 
 I* 
 
6 ON GARDENS 
 
 The garden was deprived first of its boundaries 
 and then of its flowers, sham rivers, dead trees, 
 and broken bridges were planted in appropriate 
 positions, while over the countryside in the 
 neighbourhood of the great houses there broke 
 out a dreadful eruption of Gothic temples and 
 Anglo-Saxon keeps, Corinthian arches and 
 Druid amphitheatres, of classic urns, Chinese 
 pagodas and Egyptian pyramids, all with in- 
 scriptions in Greek or black-letter appealing to 
 the eye of taste and to the tear of sensibility. 
 
 Modern writers who wish to make the best of 
 both gardening worlds endeavour to excuse these 
 aberrations as excesses for which the style 
 itself must not be held responsible, but though 
 much may be said for the simple garden, the 
 whole theory of the natural garden is absolutely 
 unsound. If the house requires a platform as 
 a statue requires a pedestal, if the bold pro- 
 jections and broad shadows of terrace and 
 stairway are peculiarly valuable in the fore- 
 ground, if water in a small volume is ridiculous 
 or squalid unless set off by formal masonry, if 
 standing pools double by reflection the beauty 
 of flowers and trees, if the contrast of vege- 
 tation and stonework is dear to the heart 
 of every artist, why are we to sacrifice all these 
 advantages to a sentiment which has not even 
 the merit of being sincere ? " You will observe," 
 says the landscapist, introducing us to his ideal 
 pleasure ground, " that here there is nothing 
 
THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN 7 
 
 regular, nothing artificial, no straight lines or 
 pleached hedges or tonsured trees ; only a 
 loving and reverent study of beautiful Nature's 
 methods and a patient attempt to reproduce 
 her pictures : the idea is that we are in a 
 natural glade of the forest." Quite so, we 
 venture to remark, but what about the mown 
 grass and the rather undecided gravel path 
 and the scentless roses and the rich and startling 
 masses of horticulturists' flowers and the un- 
 happy blotches of subtropical foliage ? " We 
 must assume," he replies, " that this is a 
 kind of grass that doesn't grow and that the 
 gravel path is an unfortunate accident." Very 
 well, we say again, anxious to enter into the 
 spirit of the thing, but what about the house ; 
 is that an unfortunate accident too ? It is 
 indeed upon this point that the theory of the 
 landscape garden goes to total shipwreck. 
 You can't hope to persuade us that Nature built 
 the house : why insult our understanding by 
 pretending that Nature made the garden ? The 
 utmost extreme to which artificiality can go is 
 the mock-natural. If this be defended on the 
 ground that the garden is a land of illusion in 
 which any fraud is permissible, we are bound 
 to point out that it is a deception which fails to 
 deceive ; if on the other hand we are asked to 
 accept it as a frank convention, what is to be 
 thought of aU this high-flown sentiment about 
 the graceful touch of Nature ? No mastery 
 
8 ON GARDENS 
 
 over form can save from failure a work of art 
 animated by a faulty or defective idea. Now 
 Hegel has pointed out in his ^Esthetics that the 
 affectation of want of purpose and contrivance, 
 the pretence of disorder, of natural primeval 
 solitude in an artificial scene which has been 
 deliberately planned for human enjoyment and 
 for social intercourse, is one of those primary 
 discords which no ingenuity can soften or 
 conceal, for the jarring note will be heard above 
 all the music of the landscape. In such a scene 
 civilised man is out of place, and even the land- 
 scape gardener who contrived it must follow 
 the example of the ancient Britons and put on 
 a suit of woad, if he wishes to be in harmony 
 with the surroundings. Yet another discord in 
 the motive is that between the house and the 
 woodland lawn upon which it has apparently 
 dropped from the skies : the house is at war 
 with the landscape and the landscape with the 
 house, each has a different tale to teU, and no 
 natural beauty of flower or tree can relieve us 
 from the shock of contradiction and the pain 
 of incongruity. Curving paths cannot be right, 
 for the Chinese themselves, with whom the 
 landscape style began, make their paths straight, 
 arguing that they must be due either to design 
 or to repeated passage, that no sober man will 
 deliberately propose to reach his destination by 
 a series of curves, and even if the inhabitants 
 of a house or hamlet were to get drunk in com- 
 
THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN 9 
 
 pany, that it is hardly possible they should all 
 describe precisely the same reel of intoxication. 
 Flower-beds in stars or moons or rounded figures 
 cannot be right : they are simply unquiet and, 
 as Ruskin points out, straight lines are the best 
 foil to the grace of natural curves in plant and 
 flower. It cannot be right to endeavour to 
 realise in a garden the compositions of the great 
 masters of painting, for that is to sacrifice 
 general beauty to a few selected points of view, 
 and how is one to compose a picture with chang- 
 ing materials when the foreground is wandering 
 into the middle distance, the figures and the cattle 
 are moving on, the saplings are burgeoning 
 into a grove ? It cannot be right to crowd 
 together in a few acres all the mood-compelling 
 aspects of nattire, the gay, the tranquil, the 
 romantic, the picturesque, the melancholy, the 
 tragic, the terrible, the sublime ; of to fill the 
 park with abbeys and hermitages, Greek temples 
 and Gothic castles, which are both incongruous 
 with each other and through meanness of scale 
 and poverty of material do not deceive but only 
 offend. That indeed is the final outcome of 
 the landscape garden: it appeals to many 
 emotions but touches only one, a pecuhar kind 
 of heart-sinking which one remembers to have 
 experienced before upon entering some Chippen- 
 dale-Gothic mansion belonging to the same 
 period of art. 
 
 Is it not time that the world should abandon 
 
lo ON GARDENS 
 
 these follies of the Decadence, should turn again 
 for inspiration to the " high- walled gardens 
 green and old " of a happier time ; that it should 
 listen at last to the prayer of the eighteenth 
 century poet : 
 
 Again the moss-grown terraces to raise 
 And spread the labyrinth's perplexing maze. 
 Replace in even lines the ductile yew 
 And plant again the ancient avenue ; 
 
 that it should turn its back on Kent, Capabihty 
 Brown, and Horace Walpole, and should seek 
 to learn the principles of garden design from 
 Alberti, Michelozzo, Bramante, Vignola, Raphael, 
 Michelangelo ? 
 
 For more than two centuries the gardens of 
 the Itahan Renaissance lay under a cloud, 
 exciting, it would seem, little but contempt and 
 disgust in aU who viewed them. Misson (i) writes 
 in 1688 that in magnificence the gardens of 
 France so far surpass those of Italy, that the 
 best way to save the credit of Frascati and 
 Pratolino is to pass over in silence all the pretty 
 wonders that were once so highly extoUed ; and 
 speaks with something hke contempt of Villa 
 d'Este, which only cost three million francs to 
 build, while the very lead of the canals at 
 Versailles was worth all Tivoh put together. A 
 writer in the Landscape Annual for 1831 re- 
 marks of Villa d'Este that though delightfully 
 situated, it is deformed by the bad taste in which 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY n 
 
 the grounds about it are disposed. An English 
 traveller, twenty years later, brings a still more 
 sweeping indictment against the gardens of 
 Frascati : they want character and expression, 
 belong to the dark ages of art ; with so profuse 
 an expenditure it is wonderful that so little in- 
 vention has been displayed and that so little 
 beauty has been the result (2). 
 
 Let us turn our steps to Italy, and see how 
 far such strictures are justified. These old 
 ItaUan gardens, with their air of neglect, 
 desolation, and solitude, in spite of the 
 melancholy of the weed-grown alleys, the 
 weary dropping of the fern-fringed fountains, 
 the fluteless Pans and headless nymphs and 
 armless ApoUos, have a beauty which is 
 indescribable, producing upon the mind an 
 impression which it is difficult to analyse, to 
 which no words can do justice. In all the 
 world there is no place so full of poetry as that 
 ViUa d'Este which formahst and naturalist 
 united to decry. Driving past the httle Temple 
 of Vesta, high above the seething cauldron of 
 the Anio, one is admitted through vaulted 
 corridors and deserted chambers where faded 
 frescoes moulder on the wall to a stairway 
 overhanging the garden. And the garden that 
 lies in the abyss below, terrace after terrace 
 looking out upon wooded mountain flank and 
 far mysterious plain — surely Time has for- 
 gotten these giant cypresses which lift from 
 
12 ON GARDENS 
 
 the gulf dark pinnacles of night, great rugged, 
 gloomy-verdured spires ; surely it is the garden 
 of a dream ? Behind one Uke a cliff rises a 
 palace of romance, vast, august, austere ; a 
 palace over which in a far-off age some mighty 
 magician has thrown an enchanting spell of 
 sleep. Sleep and forgetfulness brood over the 
 garden, and everywhere from sombre alley and 
 moss-grown stair there rises a faint^ sweet 
 ■(ri^S"-^^ - ?i-- -*i??-^T- III the valley below a 
 woman's voice is singing an old-world melody, 
 sad and pure and strange as the Spinning-song 
 of Wagner ; a tune which tells of a prisoned 
 soul and the longing to be free. And still one 
 may listen to the magic of the wizard's music, 
 for the muffled thunder of the great cascade 
 dominates the whole garden, and above it, 
 blended like the rolling of the spheres into one 
 deep melodious thrill, are the varying notes 
 of murmuring, mourning, whispering, rioting, 
 rejoicing water. 
 
 On the left, the garden looks down upon 
 grey-green olives shot with silver in the sunlight, 
 and upon a vine-clad pergola which clings 
 like a spider's web to undulating slope and dell. 
 Deep drifts of withered leaves have gathered 
 on the stairways, the fountain basins are over- 
 grown with maidenhair or choked with water- 
 weeds, the empty niches draped with velvety 
 moss or tapestried with creepers. Descending 
 by weed-grown stair and crumbling balustrade, 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY 13 
 
 one reaches a gloomy alley where a hundred 
 fountains gush into a trough beneath a line of 
 mouldering reliefs. At the further end of the 
 terrace, falling in great cascades like the folds 
 of a Naiad's robe or the flash of a silver sword, 
 the river leaps into the garden, to four great 
 pools of troubled water, a jewelled belt which 
 quivers in the sunlight with a mysterious, an 
 amazing blue. Such is the garden in the sober 
 dayhght, but what it may be in the summer 
 nights, when the breath of the ivy comes and 
 goes in waves of drowsy perfume, and great 
 white moths are fluttering about the fountains, 
 and in the ilex arbours and gloomy alcoves 
 there are strange mutterings, and deep-drawn 
 sighs, and whispering voices, and flashes of 
 ghostly white, I do not dare to say. 
 
 The Duke of Lante's garden is of another 
 character, a place not of grandeur or tragedy 
 but of enchanting loveliness, a paradise of 
 gleaming water, gay flowers and golden light. 
 The long, straight, dusty road from Viterbo 
 leads at length by a bridge across a deep ravine 
 to a gap in the town walls of Bagnaia, 'twixt 
 Gothic castle and Baroco church, then turning 
 at a right angle in the piazza one sees in front 
 the great Renaissance gateway which opens 
 into the garden. But it is better, if permission 
 may be obtained, to enter the park, and striking 
 upward by green lawns and ilex groves to 
 follow from its source the tiny streamlet upon 
 
14 ON GARDENS 
 
 which pool, cascade, and water-temple are 
 threaded like pearls upon a string. Dropping 
 from a ferny grotto between two pillared 
 loggias, this rivulet rises again in an elaborate 
 fountain surrounded by mossy benches set in 
 the alcoves of a low box hedge. Four giant 
 plane trees lift a canopy against the sun, and 
 tail stone columns rising from a balustraded 
 wall warn off the intruding woodland. Thence, 
 running underground, it emerges unexpectedly 
 in the centre of a broad flight of steps between 
 the claws of a gigantic crab — Cardinal Gam- 
 bara's cognisance — and races down a long 
 scalloped trough, rippling and writhing like a 
 huge snake over the carved shells which bar 
 its passage. From this it drops over the edge 
 of a small basin between two colossal river-gods 
 into a pool below. The fall to the next level 
 gives us a half -recessed temple d'eau, with 
 innumerable jets and runlets pouring from basin 
 to basin ; and here, flanked by stately plane 
 trees and by the two pavilions which make up 
 the casino, is a grass-plot commanding the 
 loveliest view of the garden. Before us lies a 
 square enclosure jutting out into the vale 
 below, with high green hedges, sweet broderies 
 of box bordered by flowers, and in the midst 
 a broad water-garden leading by balustraded 
 crossways to an island fountain which rises 
 like a mount to four great figures of sombre- 
 tinted stone. Water gushes from the points of 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY 15 
 
 the star which the naked athletes upUft, from 
 the mouths of the Uons by their side, from the 
 masks on the balustrade, from the tiny galleys 
 in which vagrant cupids are afloat upon the 
 pools. It is a colour harmony of cool refreshing 
 green and brighter flowers, of darkest bronze, 
 blue pools and golden light. Much there is of 
 mystery in the garden, of subtle magic, of 
 strange, elusive charm which must be felt but 
 cannot wholly be understood. Much, no doubt, 
 depends upon the setting, upon the ancient 
 ilexes and wild mountain flank, the mighty 
 hedge of green at the further end with its 
 great piUared gateway and the dark walls and 
 orange-lichened roofs of the houses and tower 
 irregularly grouped behind it ; upon the quiet 
 background, the opal hues of green, violet, and 
 grey in the softly modelled plain, and shadowy 
 outlines of the distant hiUs. But the soul of 
 the garden is in the blue pools which, by some 
 strange wizardry of the artist, to stair and 
 terrace and window throw back the undimmed 
 azure of the Itahan sky. 
 
 The Giusti garden at Verona strikes yet 
 another chord, a motive not of sweet or sombre 
 or tragic, but of intensely solemn loveliness: 
 Driving across the bridge along a duU and 
 dusty street, the carriage stops at a stuccoed 
 house with painted architecture, not much 
 better than the rest. But when the heavy 
 entrance doors are swung back, an enchanted 
 
1 6 ON GARDENS 
 
 vista holds the traveller speU-bound — ^the deep, 
 refreshing green of an avenue of cypresses half 
 a millennium old/ leading to a precipice crowned 
 by the foliage of a higher garden. For pure 
 sensation there is nothing in Italy equal to this 
 first glimpse through the Giusti gateway. It is 
 but the nature of a single tree, yet presented 
 with such mastery that the traveller is inchned 
 to doubt the evidence of his eyes. " Can it be 
 true," he asks himseU, " can anything in the 
 world be so beautiful ? " The little entrance 
 court is bounded by high battlemented walls, 
 and in the centre tall piers set with obelisks 
 frame in the view ; a gravel walk slopes upward 
 in a hoUow curve between the trees, until the 
 ascent becoming too abrupt it breaks into three 
 flights of steps, diminished in breadth in order 
 to increase the effect of distance: these lead 
 to a dark cavernous recess in the face of a 
 rocky precipice, planted above with such a wild 
 riot of jagged cypresses as might serve for a 
 painted scene of a witches' sabbath. Toiling 
 upwards through a tower built against the face 
 of the cliff one reaches terrace walks above, and 
 a two-storied garden-house, where summer days 
 may be spent high above the toil and turmoil 
 
 1 So one is told ; but the garden is first mentioned in 
 1644 and appears to have been laid out in the sixteenth 
 century, perhaps by San Michele, who added to or altered 
 the house. The older cypresses, one of which was supposed 
 to be seven hundred years old, belonged to an earlier scheme. 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY 17 
 
 of the town. Here, from a projecting balcony, 
 one may look down upon the venerable trees, 
 upon the green parterres with their fountains 
 and statues sloping upwards to the base of 
 the rock, and upon such a maze of ribbed tiling 
 and crooked streets as may be seen from many 
 a northern minster tower. Far away in the 
 blue Lombardic plain he the domes and meres 
 of Mantua ; the town stretches towards them 
 in a sea of ruddy-brown roofs breaking round 
 ancient tbwers and spires ; on the right are the 
 mountains of the Tyrol, on the left through 
 garden and vineyard and mulberry-grove runs 
 the faint blue line of the Adige. Yet it is not 
 to distant city or purple mountain or bright- 
 flowing river that memory returns, but to the 
 narrow alley, girt in by sheer precipices of 
 green, which leads by cave and turret and 
 winding stair to the secret garden upon the 
 hiU. This little pathway, where twenty 
 generations have come and gone under the 
 shadow of cypresses taU as the towers of Verona 
 and older than the oldest palaces, has a grave 
 and haunting beauty which hardly seems to 
 belong to the existing order of things : it 
 might have led to the place of an oracle, to the 
 garden of Plato, the tomb of Dante, the cavern 
 where sleeps the Venus of the ancient world. 
 
 These are the three great gardens of Italy, 
 for the charm of Caprarola hes only in the 
 Canephorse— in the giant guard of sylvan 
 
 3 
 
1 8 ON GARDENS 
 
 divinities, playing, quarrelling, laughing the 
 long centuries away, which rise from the wall 
 of the topmost terrace against the blue distance 
 of an immeasurable amphitheatre walled in by 
 far-off hills. Isola Bella, again, is a thing by 
 itself, not a garden, but a mirage in a lake 
 of dreams; a great galleon with flower-laden 
 terraces and fantastic pinnacles which has 
 anchored here against a background of purple 
 mountains on its return to the realm of rococo. 
 For other work of the first rank we must turn 
 to smaller schemes or to parts of gardens, to 
 the balustraded pool at Frascati, the water- 
 theatre of the Villa Aldobrandini, the lemon 
 grove of the Isolotto at Florence. Of these the 
 last is probably known to every one who has 
 visited Italy. It is an oval lake encompassed 
 by a broad pathway in the shadow of a mighty 
 wall of ilex. Marble seats are set under the 
 green canopy, and quaint baroque fountains 
 from curving shells and gullets of sea-monsters 
 drop tiny rills into the lake, where merman and 
 sea-nymph on water ^horses are wildly urging 
 their steeds towards the shore. In the centre 
 of the island a gigantic basin of stone supports 
 three seated figures bracketed against the pe- 
 destal of John of Bologna's splendid statue of 
 Oceanus. But the glory of the Isolotto is in its 
 balustrade, where instead of pilasters we have 
 sweeping curves cut away to admit great red 
 garden-vases, which with their burden of green 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY 19 
 
 and gold are doubled upon the water film, 
 far above the clouds that are sailing through 
 the blue gulf below. 
 
 Villa Torlonia at Frascati is not like Villa 
 d'Este, where the great heart of the Anio throbs 
 through the garden and every grove and thicket 
 and alley is filled with a tumult of sobbing 
 sound. It is a place of mysterious silence, of 
 low-weeping fountains and muffled footfalls ; a 
 garden of sleep. The gates are on a lower 
 level, and athwart the rose-tangled slope to 
 the left the architect has thrown five great 
 slanting staircases of stone, broad enough and 
 splendid enough to carry an army of guests to 
 the plateau above. But this is now a solitude, 
 a mournful ilex bosco with cross walks and 
 mossy fountains shaped hke the baluster of 
 some great sundial. From the central stairway, 
 not far from the house, a broader opening in 
 the woodland leads to a lawn and pool below 
 the great cascade. In front is a long cliff 
 crowned with ilex forest and faced with a 
 frontispiece of moss-grown arches and bubbling 
 fountains. The main fall drops from a balcony 
 between two tall umbrageous ilexes which rise 
 on either hand like the horns of an Addisonian 
 periwig ; from basin to basin it drops in a silver 
 fringe, held in by low serpentine walls that 
 curve and re-curve like the arches of a bridge 
 or the edges of a shell. Through vaults on 
 either hand, long winding stairways follow the 
 
20 ON GARDENS 
 
 curves, the masonry is choked with ferns, the 
 steps with weeds, and riotous water-plants 
 crowd upon the ledges or thrust green juicy 
 stems through the scum which has gathered 
 in the corners of the pools. At the top, in a 
 small irregular clearing walled by wild ilex 
 wood and wilder tangle of flowering shrubs, is 
 a balustraded basin in the form of a great 
 quatrefoil. Gold-red fish gleam in the sea-green 
 water, which reflects soft foliage and hchened 
 stone and patches of pearly light ; in the centre 
 a huge cylinder of moss supports the silvery 
 feathers of a fountain ; it is an enchanted pool 
 in a fairy woodland. But the traveller who has 
 wandered here alone on a drowsy afternoon does 
 not linger to hsten to the trickle of the fountain 
 and the murmuring of the bees. From below 
 the threshold of the mind a strange sense of 
 hidden danger oppresses him, an instinct neither 
 to be reasoned with nor to be understood. 
 Can there be brigands yet in the forest heights, 
 or is the place haunted by shades of the soldiers 
 who once fell in battle about the pool ? He 
 waits and wrestles with his folly, then sadly 
 descending the slippery stairways leaves cooling 
 fount and shaded alley for the torrid sunshine 
 of the outer world. 
 
 It is death to sleep in the garden. 
 
 For smaller schemes, showing how a great 
 effect may be produced within a narrow com- 
 pass, the architect will turn to the Cicogna 
 
GARDENS OF ITALY 21 
 
 garden at Varese, Villa Gamberaia near 
 Florence ; perhaps one should add Villa Ber- 
 nardini in the neighbourhood of Lucca. Other 
 gardens there are which seem to have worked 
 out the ultimate possibilities of some particular 
 problem. At Bogliaco, on Lake Garda, a road 
 intervenes between the hill-side pleasure- 
 ground and the palace, which is by the shore. 
 On either flank of the house is a little terrace 
 and bridge across the road, walled on the 
 outside to screen the view, and from these 
 bridges walks backed by tail yew hedges sweep 
 round in a semicircle to the central ascent, with 
 its double stairways adorned with arcading and 
 statuary.^ The public highway, losing its 
 character, has become a private approach. At 
 Cadenabbia, a footpath along the shore cuts 
 off Villa Carlo tti from the lake. Here the 
 Casino is on a higher level, balustraded stair- 
 ways lead down to a circular garden with a 
 graceful baroque fountain, and hedges twenty- 
 five feet high curving forward in plan cover 
 the path, conceal the flat uninteresting 
 water-edge, and concentrate the view. At 
 CasteUo d'Urio on Como, a late sixteenth- 
 century garden with many statues, a public 
 road offers the same difficulty, which is overcome 
 by a stepped approach and bridge leading to 
 a gate of hammered iron. Villa Borghese at 
 Frascati has a garden at two levels, a great 
 
 ^ The date of the palace and garden is about 1750. 
 
 2* 
 
22 ON GARDENS 
 
 semicircular court disengaging the house and 
 giving light and air to the lower rooms. Castello 
 near Florence and Villa Imperiale at Genoa 
 deal with the difficulties of a sloping site, where 
 the straight walks are on a gentle and easy 
 decline and the terraces lean to the house. 
 Castelazzo, a few miles from Milan, ViUas 
 Gori and Sergardi at Siena, ViUa Reale near 
 Lucca, Villa Garzoni at CoUodi, and the garden 
 of the Castelnuovo Institute at Palermo, illus- 
 trate the charm of rustic theatres ; Villas 
 Bernardini, Senese, Mansi, Reale, all in the 
 Lucca neighbourhood, the beauty of balustraded 
 pools ; the Colonna garden at Rome, Villa 
 Cicogna at Varese, Villa Pliniana on Lake 
 Como, the summer delights of a central cascade ; 
 Villas Borghese and Mondragone at Frascati, 
 the advantage, even in the country, of a retired 
 or secret garden on the level of the first floor, 
 opening out of study or saloon. 
 
 Of the town gardens first introduced by 
 Epicurus at Athens, Italy furnishes many 
 examples. The Colonna palace at Rome is 
 connected by four graceful bridges with its 
 terraced retreat across the roadway, where 
 fountain and cascade, box, ilex, and cypress 
 cover the giant cornices of the Baths of Con- 
 stantine. At the Castle of Ferrara, the old 
 terrace-garden is still in existence, and at 
 Mantua there is a giardino pensile, supported 
 by five great tunnels of brick ; which, however. 
 
TOWN GARDENS 23 
 
 loses its effect for want of outlook. At Vicenza 
 the garden attached to the Palazzo Bonin 
 slopes upwards at the further end and to the 
 right, where a balustraded terrace over some 
 outhouses leads to a projecting wing occupied 
 by a great saloon. At Genoa there are several 
 gardens raised above the level of the street, 
 as at the Palazzo Durazzo Pallavicini. At 
 Lucca, the fortress-palace of the Guinigi has 
 its garden of flower-beds and ilexes upon the 
 summit of the tower. But the great majority 
 of these palace gardens lie on the level of the 
 street, and there are few of the older cities 
 which will not yield to the passing traveller 
 some glimpse of fairyland, some vista of fern- 
 draped niche or mossy fountain, of Neptune 
 with his trident or Hercules with his club, or 
 of a green cortile seen through the rolling curves 
 and rusty scroll-work of a rococo gateway.^ 
 He is toiling through the hot, dusty street of 
 Verona on a torrid day in June, when fierce 
 sunshine beats back from wall and pavement 
 
 1 The traveller must not miss the charming garden-court 
 of the Palazzo Controni-Pini at Lucca, with its statues and 
 fountains and great red earthen jars set against a back- 
 ground of old grey ramparts, nor that of the Palazzo Gius- 
 tiniani (Via del Santo, 21) at Padua with its loggia and 
 banqueting-house designed by Falconetto ; nor those in the 
 Via dei Fiori, Via Moretti, Via Soncino, Via Triest at Brescia. 
 In the town of Como, the Palazzo Giovio, now turned into a 
 museum, has at the end of the garden a terrace commanding 
 a view of the mountain side, j 
 
24 ON GARDENS 
 
 and roadway ; the cool breath of the mountains 
 whispers in his ear, and there through the portal 
 of the Canossa palace Kes the foaming river 
 twenty feet below ; beyond it blue vineyard 
 slopes and a chain of snowy peaks : a little 
 terrace^ soine seventy yards long, overhangs the 
 water, which curves outward to the rose-red 
 towers of the embattled bridge, the brown 
 roofs and fortress walls of the ancient city. 
 Or, on an April morning when the call of Spring 
 is in the air, he is passing along the Via S. 
 Marco at Vicenza, in the centre, for all that 
 may be imagined, of a spider's web of tiresome 
 streets, and there through the open doorway 
 of the Quirini palace is the country — swift- 
 flowing brooks and a sweet level of meadowland 
 yellow with buttercups. An avenue of horn- 
 beam on either hand walls out the town, and 
 in the centre a formal approach, a quarter of 
 a mile long,^ bordered by statues, vases, and 
 green pyramids of lignum vitce, leads to a moated 
 mound crowned by a classic temple. When he 
 has crossed at length the broad, clear water, and 
 is mounting towards the great stone pines which 
 cast their shadow over the building, a fresh 
 surprise awaits him, for, ringing almost three- 
 quarters of the horizon, there rises before his 
 eyes a tremendous amphitheatre of mountains. 
 Nowhere are these garden vistas more de- 
 hghtful and more varied than at Bergamo, 
 
 * I made it 485 paces to the centre of the mound. 
 
TOWN GARDENS 25 
 
 where one cortile looks out upon a long line 
 of giant ramparts curtained with creepers, and 
 bright with red and white valerian and golden 
 snapdragon ; another upon a wooded hiUside 
 and an enfilade of mountain peaks ; another 
 upon a green ocean that stretches as far as 
 the eye can reach, a vast interminable level of 
 mulberry-wooded plain. And there is a peculiar 
 fascination in the upward views through grate 
 and pillared court and further archway deep in 
 shadow, across sunny gardens backed by green 
 foliage of bay or laurel, to the huge grey bastions 
 crowned by chestnut trees, the random tiers 
 of tall red-roofed houses, the towers, belfries 
 and cupolas of the ancient citta on the hiU; 
 These long vistas which pierce a succession of 
 buildings and enclosures seem to appeal to the 
 sentiment of power, and there is some mysterious 
 charm in the alternation of hght and shadow, 
 the contrast of formal masonry and random 
 creepers, in the effect of gloom with light beyond, 
 the seclusion of a secret garden far withdrawn 
 from the dust and traffic of the street. How 
 much do the wayfarer and the poorer town- 
 dweUer owe to these delightful confidences, 
 to the mountain breeze which cools the air, the 
 touch of romance which relieves the monotony 
 of city life, and like a rose in winter glows with 
 the promise of a brighter world ! 
 
 For the dwellers in other cities where nature is 
 shyer and more retiring, that kindly magician 
 
26 ON GARDENS 
 
 the scene-painter has called lake, mountain and 
 river into the street. Placed behind a pillared 
 screen, with a fountain or strip of garden in 
 the foreground, these landscapes are strangely 
 deceitful. Beyond the cortile of the Palazzo 
 Raimondi at Cremona one sees through a tall 
 arch garlanded with twisted stems and smothered 
 with trailing leafage of wistaria, and ivy, a 
 distant view of Alpine lake and heights, per- 
 haps of the mountain home from which the 
 family came. Beyond the strip of garden, a 
 boat lies on the beach of the lake, which re- 
 flects like a sheet of glass the towers and houses 
 of a little town set in the shadow of a mighty 
 cliff. This scene is painted upon a wall shaped 
 to the profile of the hills. The decorative 
 scheme of the Palazzo Costa ^ at Piacenza, 
 though more elaborate, is hardly so successful. 
 A marble balustrade adorned with statues 
 and urns divides the court from the garden, 
 beyond which is a wall serrated to a mountain 
 outline ; but here Time, with his greys and 
 greens and umbers, has followed on the heels of 
 the landscape-painter, and bridge and terrace, 
 woodland and precipice are mouldering away. 
 But it is in Brescia, above all places, that the 
 painted vista reigns, for here a southern imagina- 
 tion has run riot, and the stranger may make 
 his choice of time and place and season, of 
 Goth or Roman, of spring or autumn, of tropic 
 
 * Via S. Lazaio. 
 
TOWN GARDENS 27 
 
 palms or Arctic snows. Here beyond the 
 palace courts are great pointed vaults and 
 ruined castle halls. Renaissance loggias, wild 
 rococo fantasies of pillared porticoes, of crum- 
 bling theatres, of interminable arcades. Here 
 are lake scenes with vast planes of stubborn 
 rock lifting themselves into the sky, tiny 
 hamlets clustering round a church tower upon 
 the mountain side, bright palaces gleaming on 
 the water edge, while all the landscape seems 
 to swoon in a white haze of heat. Here on the 
 bosom of a mystic river, leading from nowhere 
 to nowhere, a slow boatman with averted face 
 is ever seeking to raise an unprofitable sail ; 
 and here are dreams of the old Roman world 
 before the fall which make one tremble at the 
 sound of a church bell, for by stream or cataract 
 the shepherd is piping to his flock, and under the 
 shadow of the great stone pines shine out the 
 marble statues and temples of the Gods. 
 
 Of the principles which guided the great 
 Renaissance garden-makers it is not so easy 
 to speak, for it was in poetry, in imagination 
 that they reigned supreme, and inspiration is 
 a breath of the muses which may not be brought 
 within the rules of art. Their first thought was 
 for the aesthetic impression upon the individual, 
 for sentiment and emotion, for intellectual 
 suggestion, for chords struck upon those vague, 
 nebulous, spectral feelings which are ever 
 trembling upon the threshold of consciousness. 
 
28 ON GARDENS 
 
 To them the garden seemed to be only half the 
 problem, the other half was that blundering 
 ghost-haunted miracle, the human mind. Thus 
 they learnt the value of striking contrast ; 
 of sudden and thrilling surprise ; of close con- 
 finement as a prelude to boundless freedom ; 
 of scorching sun as a prelude to welcome shade 
 or cooling river ; of monotony, even of ugliness, 
 set for a foil to enchanting beauty, as a discord 
 is used in music, as the lowered tone of a 
 landscape brings out the fires of sunset or the 
 primrose light of dawn, as a dwarfish figure 
 on a Greek sarcophagus gives grandeur to a 
 frieze of fighting heroes. Their work, like 
 that of all great artists, is full of mystery, of 
 haunting beauty, of magic which all must feel 
 but few can understand. Take, for example, 
 the treatment of water. The Italian mastery 
 over the " water-art " has been dealt with by 
 a score of writers, who have failed to notice 
 that a higher poetry may be found in that 
 element than the beauty of form and sound, 
 than the shifting curves of a fountain or the 
 deep-toned music of a great cascade. There 
 is the poetry of colour. Surely some one of 
 these writers miist have noticed the blue of 
 the Vatican fountain,^ the greenish tint of the 
 basin at Caprarola, the mysterious reflections 
 of the water-garden at Lante which strangely 
 and beyond experience mirrors the sky. But, 
 
 1 Dello Scoglio. This has colour even on a sunless day. 
 
GARDEN-MAGIC 29 
 
 fresh it may be from the lovely colouring of 
 Como and Maggiore, or from the blue-crystal 
 strand of Garda, where the sunlight is ever 
 dancing in a magic web over the pebbles, they 
 have attributed these effects to any cause but 
 the right one ; to happy chance, to the depth 
 or purity of the water, the clearness of the 
 atmosphere, the glowing radiance of the southern 
 sun. At the ViUa Borghese at Frascati a httle 
 basin some twelve feet across gives away the 
 secret ; the clipped ilex which surrounds it 
 has been planned to cut off lateral reflections, 
 admitting only bright sunshine from above ; 
 the beauty is due not to accident but to design. 
 These great Itahans had learnt to play with 
 water as a sultan with his jewels, as Turner 
 played with Hght ; prisoning the blue of the 
 sea in a tiny pool, the green of the chrysoprase 
 in a fountain basin, the iris of the rainbow in a 
 crystal spray ; making it glow like a ruby 
 with blood-red marbles, or quiver in the sun- 
 shine with the blue light of Capri, or throw back 
 as from a mirror the deeper azure of the Italian 
 sky. 
 
 Nowhere, except in Italy, can one learn the 
 magnificence of the raised approach. The up- 
 ward slope at the Marchese Ferrasan's at Savona, 
 bordered by orange-trees in great red vases, 
 must be twenty feet above the garden where it 
 meets the marble terrace, opposite the centre 
 of the house. At Loano, midway between 
 
JO ON GARDENS 
 
 Alassio and Savona, is a still finer approach, an 
 arched bridge great as a Roman aqueduct, 
 connected with what is apparently a small 
 castle. Perhaps the grandest of all is that 
 which leads to the modern Villa Pallavicini at 
 Pegh, where huge retaining- walls of stone a 
 quarter of a mile long and in places not less 
 than sixty feet high Uft up a roadway bordered 
 with flowers and shaded by an ilex avenue. 
 For the greater part of its course this road points 
 at a comer of the casino, but presently curves 
 away to the left in order to strike the nearer 
 end of the garden terrace. At the Villa Alber- 
 tini at Lecco on Lake Como, the sloping stair- 
 way of grass and stone has a drop of from six 
 to ten feet on either hand ; a difference in level 
 of even a foot is of value, as may be noticed in 
 the Abbondi garden at Riva. 
 
 The Italian love of looking down from a 
 height upon a great parterre of flowers finds 
 expression in the Roman gardens of the Vatican, 
 Villa Medici and Villa Pamphili. Another 
 favourite motive in ItaUan gardens is coolness in 
 the summer heat, and few of the larger houses 
 are without a grotto adorned with fountain 
 and marble floor and encrustej^ with sea-sheUs 
 or fantastic pebble-work. Evelyn speaks of 
 the rooms under the great fountain in the Pitti 
 Palace, not perhaps so delightfxil a retreat as 
 that in the bridge at Blenheim ; and describes 
 the water alley at Pratolino, from the sides of 
 
MOTIVES OF DESIGN 31 
 
 which slender streams rose in the air, making 
 a perfect vault and falling interchangeably 
 into each other's channels, so that a horseman 
 might ride from one end to the other without a 
 single drop being spilt upon him. The Villa 
 Pliniana near Como is built in the shade of a 
 wooded cliff upon a foundation of earth and 
 stones flung down from above, and through the 
 central loggia a foaming cascade leaps to the 
 lake, filling the whole house with the refresh- 
 ment of its coolness and the tumult of its sound. 
 At the Villa di Papa Giuho one may dine in a 
 watery saloon, surrounded by running streams 
 and bubbling fountains. The court of the 
 papal Palace at Viterbo hangs in mid-air over 
 a mighty arch of stone ; on either side long 
 benches are set against an open arcade of inter- 
 laced arches, and to the central fountain water 
 rises from below through a great octagonal 
 pillar which runs into the vault. It was built 
 by the wizard Pope, John XXL, who in 1277 
 was crushed to death in an adjoining chamber 
 by diabolic agency, for suddenly as he laughed 
 in pride at the splendour of his work the aveng- 
 ing roof fell in ruin upon his head. To one of 
 the grottoes of the Aldobrandini garden at 
 Frascati secret conduits used to bring in a 
 current of air strong enough to keep a copper 
 ball dancing a yard above the pavement ; and 
 here again the whole scheme of house and garden 
 is planned for summer shade and coolness. At 
 
32 ON GARDENS 
 
 the back, a wooded hill almost overhanging 
 the palace has been cut away in a great semi- 
 circle to form a rustic theatre of fountains, 
 so that sitting in the great saloon one may see 
 the frigid stream from Monte Algido racing 
 down in cascade and cataract and long sloping 
 aqueduct to two tall pillars of stone, which 
 it mounts in a spiral curve, then falls with the 
 sound of a cannonade upon an heroic figure 
 of Atlas tottering under the weight of a deluged 
 world. Or, turning one's chair, one may look 
 out over the vast stretches of the Campagna, 
 the most impressive plain in Europe, and feel 
 on one's cheek the gentle breeze which plays 
 upon the hillside, blowing from the distant sea. 
 Even the detail of Italian garden architecture 
 is wqll worth the study of the designer. For 
 screens or niches to terminate a terrace he wiU 
 turn to the Imperiali and other gardens at 
 Genoa rather than to Tivoli or Frascati. From 
 many of the villas about Rome, Florence and 
 the Lakes, he will learn to frame in his views 
 and close his vistas with triumphal arches or 
 grand pillared frontispieces which fill the eye ; 
 to get on a scale with his stairways, making the 
 risers only of stone, the treads of pebble or 
 gravel or beaten earth ; ^ to obtain a rough or 
 
 1 At Villa Muti, Frascati, there is a good combination of 
 slope and stairway. This is all of stone, and following each 
 step is an incline of double the length. The grass steps at 
 Villa Gamberaia have box borders to cover the ragged edges. 
 
GARDEN DETAIL 33 
 
 rustic surface for niches and great wall-fountains 
 by stones or pebbles embedded in mortar ; ^ to 
 make his piers of stately height and his iron 
 gates plain and bold, without ornament except 
 for the curved outline at the top. How inferior 
 are the gateposts at Montacute, at Drayton, 
 even at Hampton Court, to those at Frascati 
 or Albano, or the splendid piers in the Botanic 
 Garden at Palermo ! He will learn to relieve 
 plots of turf with statues, and masses of reflected 
 light upon the surface of a pool with mermen 
 on water-horses, or little flower-laden galleys, 
 or cupids astride on plunging dolphins. Villa 
 Arsen at Hyeres, the Grand Hotel at Varese, 
 Villa Crivelli at Inverigo wiU teach him the 
 grace and freedom of wide rococo stairways 
 with curving fronts ; Castelazzo, Albissola near 
 Savona and not a few of the Florentine and 
 Roman gardens, the warmth and cheerfulness 
 of great lemon-pots ^ in a box parterre under the 
 windows of the house. Villa Medici at Rome 
 will show him the importance of putting sculp- 
 tured reliefs upon piers and pedestals and balus- 
 trade rests. At Val San Zibio near Battaglia, 
 he wUl observe the superiority of box hedges 
 
 1 See the work at Villa d'Este, Tivoli. 
 
 ' The largest I have ever seen are at Villa Sonnanni, 
 Castelazzo. These are five feet across and about 4 ft. 8 in. high, 
 made in three portions and held together by iron rings. Smaller 
 pots containing orange-trees are lifted into them. In Sicily 
 the mauve flowers of the candytuft are sometimes used to 
 cover the bare earth in the larger flower-vases, 
 
 3 
 
34 ON GARDENS 
 
 to yew, both for their sweetness and their 
 fresher green ; at Villa Bernardini in the 
 neighbourhood of Lucca, the grandeur of ever- 
 green walls thirty feet high which shut out the 
 lowlands and frame in the mountain vistas. 
 
II 
 
 The Italian feeling for sensation has often been 
 spoken of. Perhaps the best example of this 
 is furnished by another villa at Frascati, the 
 great sixteenth-century pleasure-house of Mon- 
 dragone which was built and altered and added 
 to by a succession of popes and cardinals. 
 
 From the gate on the Monte Porzio road, a 
 long dark avenue of cypress points at the palace, 
 as a cannon at a star, but the easier and more 
 usual approach is to the right between sweet 
 box hedges shaded*by forest trees. Higher up 
 is an ilex avenue, under which the ground is 
 bright in spring with the rose and mauve of the 
 wild anemone and bolder pink of the cyclamen : 
 groves of olive cut off the distant views, and 
 near the house the avenue is doubled and 
 trebled with older, darker, gnarlier trees. The 
 carriage stops between a huge waUed recess in 
 the hiUside drowned in a cataract of ivy and a 
 plain stuccoed palace-front with simple piUared 
 entrance and square window-frames of stone. 
 Passing through the great quadrangle, remark- 
 able only for scale and austerity, except for a 
 small recessed front at the further end where 
 
 35 
 
36 ON GARDENS 
 
 the Borghese dragons writhe in stone between 
 the pilasters, one enters a gloomy hall and 
 beyond it a small square chamber with painted 
 ceiling and stuccoed figures, a chamber which 
 might be the ante-room to some splendid gallery 
 or imposing saloon, but cannot have been 
 designed as the terminus of so stately an ap- 
 proach. However, there is nothing beyond but 
 a little iron balcony, and after so much gloom 
 and confinement as you step out upon it the 
 boundless view takes your breath away. 
 
 Far below the level of the palace windows 
 there opens an immeasurable plain, stretching 
 out mile after mile, league after league, day's 
 journey beyond day's journey, until at last the 
 purple distance melts at the world's edge into 
 a silvery gleam of sea. This immensity of level 
 space is not monotonous, as a meaner plain 
 might be, for it is various in aU its parts, em- 
 bracing rich pasture-lands of feathery grasses 
 and stony desolate stretches, taU pine forests 
 and grave-green marshes, low chffs and wander- 
 ing streams ; and it is responsive to every mood 
 of the passing seasons or of the flying hours, 
 from the first flush of dawn, when the traiUng 
 mist-wreaths rise from marsh, miU-stream and 
 river, until the orange Mght of midday brightens 
 to gold, and at last the dying day passes away 
 in one vast conflagration of purple and crimson 
 and fiery red. So, too, it changes with the 
 changing year. The golden summer deepens 
 
GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE 37 
 
 at length to the crimson and purple-brown of 
 autumn and winter ; the new year leaps into 
 life in a sudden tide of green ; then comes the 
 triumph of spiing, when cyclamen and hyacinth, 
 harebell and convolvulus make the war-stained 
 earth like the Garden of Paradise. 
 
 The Campagna again is not like the sea, 
 which is dreadful because it remembers not : 
 every bank and hillock has its remnant of tomb 
 or villa or fortress, for this is a wilderness of 
 ruin, a region of shallows which an ebbing tide 
 of human greatness has left strewn with myth 
 and legend ; and here under haunted mound or 
 riven tower sleep great cities which have sunk 
 into the underworld, older capitals of Latium, 
 cities which once were rich as Carthage, glorious 
 as Athens, ancient as Tyre. Countless ages 
 have passed since nature swept again over their 
 ruins in a scarlet flame of poppies or a blue tide 
 of April flowers, but the same eternal stream of 
 life in leaf and blossom is waiting for the day 
 when Rome too must go down in the abyss of 
 time ; when the red valerian shall flame upon 
 the altars, green tapestries of matted ivy shall 
 hang from pillar to pillar ; when the cUmbing 
 rose shall perfume the churches with its scented 
 showers and the shrines shall be heaped up 
 with treasure of golden broom ; when the fading 
 saints and martyrs shall be veiled by bacchana- 
 lian vine-wreaths, and the only music shall be 
 the rustling of the reeds and the sighing of the 
 
 3-^ 
 
38 ON GARDENS 
 
 grasses, the only worshippers a heavenly host 
 of flowers. 
 
 It is strange what a sense of power and 
 freedom these mighty outlooks give, lifting 
 the mind high above all the pettinesses of life, 
 like a night spent under the stars. For the 
 spirit of man like his body abhors restraint and 
 confinement, will not be pent up in a narrow 
 compass nor be content without a spacious 
 horizon in which the eye may wander and 
 fancy and memory may move. There is narrow- 
 ness and madness in these shut-in views of park 
 and mill-stream and wooded hillside, and a 
 palace to be fit for thinkers or rulers of men 
 should look down upon a distant country where 
 one may drink deep draughts of space and 
 freedom, upon a bay studded with islands, or 
 at least upon some great river which, like the 
 stream of Time, bears onwards its freight of 
 lives and treasure, of human hopes and fears. 
 
 This, then, leads up to what I believe to be 
 the great secret of success in garden-making, the 
 profound platitude that we should abandon 
 the struggle to make nature beautiful round the 
 house and should rather move the house to 
 where nature is beautiful. It is only a part of 
 the garden which lies within the boundary 
 waUs, and a great scheme planned for dull 
 or commonplace surroundings is a faulty con- 
 ception, as if one were to propose to build half 
 a house or to paint half a picture. The garden 
 
GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE 39 
 
 must be considered not as a thing by itself, 
 but as a gallery of foregrounds designed to set 
 off the soft hues of the distance ; it is Nature 
 which should call the tune, and the melody is 
 to be found in the prospect of blue hill or 
 shimmering lake, or mystery-haunted plain, in 
 the aerial perspective of great trees beyond the 
 boundary, in the green cliffs of leafy woodland 
 which wall us in on either hand. It may be 
 argued further that real beauty is neither in 
 garden nor landscape, but in the relation of 
 both to the individual, that what we are seeking 
 is not only a scenic setting for pool and fountain 
 and parterre, but a background for life. Natural 
 loveliness at the doors will give a hundred times 
 more enjoyment than loveliness a mile away, 
 and as in the earlier days when every one's 
 parlour was under the sky, when heath and 
 forest and moorland stretched up to the walls 
 of the city and the towers of the castle, health 
 will follow in its train. A garden in a verdurous 
 landscape which strikes a note of beauty and 
 freedom, of exuberant f ertiUty, of happy adapta- 
 tion to the service of man, will be a nobler gift 
 to the future, more fitted to survive ; we shall 
 share in the overflowing happiness of others, and 
 the halo of associations being so much a part of 
 the self that the two can never be disentangled, 
 those who are near to us wiU shine in our eyes 
 with a reflected light. 
 There is also to be considered the influence 
 
40 ON GARDENS 
 
 of scenery upon mood and character, an influence 
 so potent that being shown the surroundings 
 of an ancient mansion, one seems to understand 
 at a glance the Hves of those who lived under 
 its roof. There are some outlooks that stir the 
 blood like the sound of a trumpet, and others 
 that luU the senses to drqamy and indolent 
 repose. Hamerton's theory is that born in 
 every man is the need of some particular type 
 of landscape, which will throw back to him the 
 light of his own soul in grand or gay or sweet 
 or melancholy beauty ; that the lover of liberty 
 wiU find delight in the vast horizons of the ocean 
 and the desert, while the lover of tranquillity 
 will sigh for the happy valley of Rasselas or the 
 island lawns of Avilion ; that restless energy 
 will prefer the brown and rugged grandeur of 
 Salvator Rosa and indolence or weakness wUl 
 find repose in the golden peacefulness of Claude. 
 Undoubtedly there is a difference between 
 individuals. To some minds the Campagna is 
 a dismal solitude, a fever-haunted desert, a nurse 
 of terrible thoughts ; to others it is a miracle 
 of changing beauty, having just that back- 
 ground of melancholy which makes happiness 
 more profound. But such a doctrine seems to 
 allow too much to individual choice, too little 
 to heredity and early impressions. The High- 
 lander is as firmly wedded to grey boulder, 
 black tarn and boding rain-cloud as the Dutch 
 boer to his trim canals and flat alluvial plain — 
 
GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE 41 
 
 " who/' writes Tacitus of the earlier Germany, 
 " would live in such a wild and rugged country, 
 were it not his fatherland ? " The man is 
 moulded by the landscape more often than the 
 landscape is chosen by the man. Indeed, some 
 great poets seem to have become one with their 
 surroundings, giving expression — one might 
 almost say consciousness — to the scenery of a 
 particular district, as an orator gives back in 
 flood the half-formed thoughts and aspirations 
 which rise to him in vapour. Thus Wordsworth 
 reflects the soft vales and shadowy hiUs and 
 tranquil planes of hght of the English lakes, 
 Perugino the serene sweep of the blue Umbrian 
 uplands. If, then, the landscape has such 
 power over us that it may influence our very 
 thoughts and being, that greatness of soul of 
 which Longinus speaks should be sought not 
 only in the companionship of great men, great 
 books and great pictures, but in looking upon the 
 face of Nature in her grander moods. 
 
 The subUme is within the reach of few, the 
 beautiful of many, for in countries such as Italy 
 and Britain the diversity of scenic loveliness 
 and local climate, of soil, rainfall and vegetation, 
 is almost beyond belief. In the north of Scot- 
 land there are gardens fuU of plants which at 
 London would perish from the winter cold. 
 In one Pembrokeshire valley the verbena is a 
 tree of shade, while half a mile away there are 
 shrivelled oaks in a waste of gorse and heather. 
 
42 ON GARDENS 
 
 At Brindisi, the traveller may shiver on the 
 quay in a December wind, while summer is still 
 reigning in the Consul's garden across the har- 
 bour mouth. On Lake Maggiore, he may pass 
 at Isola Madre into the Tropics, and look upon 
 strange flowers and shrubs which are hardly to 
 be seen elsewhere in Europe. He may find 
 dismal solitudes, such as that great moor of 
 Rannoch which Hamerton describes, where 
 hvmdreds of square mUes are given over to a 
 chaos-world of blackness and bogs and muddy, 
 melancholy sedges, with one long sinuous lake, 
 dreary as Acheron ; and scenes of beauty be- 
 yond the power of pen to picture or pencil to 
 portray. Equally amazing are the contrasts 
 of soil, for as there are desolate and blighted 
 valleys where nature seems to lie under a curse ; 
 where the tree-forms are gnarled and stunted 
 and nothing flourishes but deadly and ill-omened 
 herbs ; where the bushy nightshade is black with 
 its poisonous berries, and gorgeous foxgloves, 
 rank masses of hemlock and nettles, foul hen- 
 bane, black mullein and stinking horehound 
 rim riot as in a witches' garden ; so there are 
 happier lands which have come under a double 
 blessing ; where the stream of life in plant and 
 tree flows with an added strength, like a brook 
 from the mountain pastures ; where the oaks 
 make a mightier bole and giant buttresses up- 
 hold the beeches ; where the mossy slopes are 
 starred with primroses in spring and in autumn 
 
GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE 43 
 
 the bracken rises breast-high in a tumbled sea 
 of green and russet-brown and tawny gold. 
 Even for a world-worn man such surroundings 
 will lighten labour and sorrow, will add to the 
 brightness of the sunny hours, and for a child 
 whose senses are yet unblunted, his whole being 
 alive to every impression of beauty, they wiU 
 heap up a treasury of golden recollections which 
 the Gods cannot take away. 
 
 But if we are to seek natural beauty and 
 to follow the senators of the Empire and the 
 cardinals of the Renaissance to the unfurrowed 
 hills, we must not be afraid to build, if occasion 
 demands, high on the mountain side, nor like 
 Lucullus and the storks and cranes to change 
 our habitation with the seasons. How many 
 a modern architect, if such a site as that of 
 Mondragone were proposed to him, would scout 
 the suggestion, pointing out that the place would 
 be bitterly cold in winter, that the cost and labour 
 of carrying up to it luggage, fuel and household 
 supplies would be intolerable ; and so the matter 
 would end in a degrading compromise, the 
 client submitting, though sadly, to the superior 
 judgment of his professional adviser, and the 
 house being placed half-way up the slope, 
 where the views are hardly worth having \vhile 
 the inconvenience is almost as great. The 
 Itahans of the sixteenth century were wiser 
 than that ; they knew the same house couldn't 
 be expected to serve for both seasons of the year ; 
 
44 ON GARDENS 
 
 they built for the summer villeggiatura and were 
 content to spend Christmas in the town. These 
 great villas at Frascati, Tivoli and Albano 
 were never intended for winter residence. At 
 the present day many men of very moderate 
 means indulge themselves with a summer 
 cottage, and this example is likely to be followed 
 by their richer and less intelligent neighbours, 
 who have more than one residence, but lack the 
 foresight to map out their lives. A house or 
 garden which is expected to look fairly weU all the 
 year round can never reach the ideal, and the 
 advantage of knowing during what months it 
 will be occupied and of planning for those months 
 alone is too obvious to be worth discussing. 
 
 Next to the choice of site, I would put the 
 maxim that we must subordinate the house 
 to the landscape, not the landscape to the 
 house,^ making it vast and austere where 
 the note is one of grandeur or ruggedness ; 
 sweet and low where nature is in a smiling 
 mood ; tall in a level plain ; rich with coupled 
 shafts and sculptured friezes and cool colonnades 
 
 1 Writers on garden-craft sissert that the house is the 
 " one immutable fact " from which everything must start. 
 But those who seek ideal beauty will allow landscape, or 
 landscape and garden in conjunction, to govern the house. 
 It is obvious that where the surrounding scenery offers a 
 quiet background admitting of elaboration in garden design, 
 the house also should be quiet. This does not necessarily 
 mean that it should be plain and unadorned ; symmetry 
 and repetition, as at Blickling, will give breadth and repose 
 to a rich fa9ade. 
 
HOUSE AND LANDSCAPE 45 
 
 if it faces a quiet prospect ; great and-dignified 
 in a country of mighty trees. As the house 
 must be related either by harmony or by 
 contrast to the surrounding scenery, so the 
 garden should be in sympathy with them both, 
 the lines being broad and simple against a 
 restless background of roUing hills and dales 
 or where nature has a touch of the sublime, 
 richer, fuller and brighter against a peaceful 
 setting of distant wooded slopes or purple 
 mountains. The climax, as in a picture, may 
 be in the foreground or may be in the back- 
 ground ; but cannot be in both.^ To the 
 house the garden will be as intimately related, 
 for it should be convenient as if one were 
 
 1 The double climax is particularly unpleasant in a wild 
 and picturesque country such, as Scotland, and many old 
 Scotch gardens are ruined by it. Intricacy of design seems 
 to be desirable (i) if the garden, being on a very high site or 
 in a plain, is shut in by foliage or castle walls ; (2) if a wooded 
 hillside in the middle distance cuts ofi the distant views ; 
 (3) if the middle distance is eliminated by a falling slope, 
 or by lofty hedges, and the distant country is broad and 
 restful. I am unable to agree with Miss Wharton, whose 
 views however deserve the greatest respect, that the success 
 of the elaborate scheme at Lante is due to the quietness of 
 the distant prospect. I attribute it to the fact that the 
 middle distance is concealed by the hedge and houses im- 
 mediately behind the garden, and consider that the town 
 of Bagnaia is a background to the garden, and the far distance 
 a background to the town. At ViUa Gamberaia, near Florence, 
 the middle views are lost in the falling ground, and far away 
 are the hillsides beyond the broad Arno valley, sprinkled with 
 white-walled viUas which give them scale and modelling and 
 human interest. 
 
46 ON GARDENS 
 
 " stepping from one room to another," and 
 will often carry forward the main divisions 
 or repeat the minor architectural features of 
 the fagade ; will lay at the feet of the house 
 its brightest gift of floWers and consider in 
 the planning of vista and parterre the outlook 
 from the windows. But the first aim of the 
 designer wiU always be to consult the genius 
 of the place, to catch the music of the land- 
 scape, and concentrate it by fitting foregrounds 
 and the concealment of defects, whether it 
 be the blue distance seen between the links 
 of a low chain of hills, the shadowy gulf of a 
 deep river-valley, or the green velvet of a 
 mulberry-wooded plain, a view as at Amalfi 
 along the limestone headlands of an enchanted 
 coast, or as at Monreale over a vale where the 
 lemon is ripening in softest green and palest 
 gold. If it be true that the connection with 
 humanity is the principal interest of every 
 landscape (3) and wiU best find expression in 
 the foreground, then these garden outlooks 
 are the most beautiful pictures in the world. 
 
 Having chosen a site and determined the 
 relation of house and garden to the landscape 
 and to each other, we may now consider more 
 closely the inward meaning of our task. The 
 garden, in every language, speaks of seclusion. 
 To flower and plant and tree it is a cloistered 
 refuge from the battle of life, a paradise where 
 free from the pinch of poverty and the malice 
 
PURPOSE OF A GARDEN 47 
 
 of their enemies, they may turn their thoughts 
 and their strength from war to beauty ; and 
 this perfect freedom of the garden finds a 
 voice in the joyous murmur of the fountain, 
 for water too is outside the struggle for existence, 
 and goes on its way rejoicing from one ocean 
 of darkness to another. So, to man, the 
 garden should be something without and beyond 
 nature ; a page from an old romance, a scene 
 in fairyland, a gateway through which imagina- 
 tion lifted above the sombre realities of life 
 may pass into a world of dreams. One 
 should be able to escape to it from labour 
 or business, from of&ce or Senate-house or 
 study, as to a haven of rest and refreshment, 
 where Time does not dole out his seconds to 
 you Uke a miser telling his guineas, nor snatch 
 again the golden moments you cannot hold : 
 no sound of the outer world should break the 
 enchantment ; no turret-clock should toll the 
 passing hours ; nor, could one silence it, should 
 there vibrate through the garden the menacing 
 voice of the church beU, with its muttered 
 curse on nature and on man, lest it beat down 
 the petals of the pagan roses. 
 
 All this would be easy enough if we were 
 living in the age of Virgil the Enchanter, or 
 Merlin, or King Roger of Sicily, or Albertus 
 Magnus, or Michael Scott ; a few woven circles 
 upon the sand, an earth-shaking spell from 
 the book, and there would be our enchanted 
 
48 ON GARDENS 
 
 fastness, high-walled hke the Garden of Mirth 
 in the old romance against pale Sorrow and 
 wrinkled Care and envious Time and all the 
 spectres of the night. But in this unimaginative 
 age, when a necromancer who ventures even 
 to tell a fortune may be committed as a rogue 
 and vagabond, it is necessary to be more cir- 
 cumspect ; we must endeavour to find some 
 form of " white " magic which does not come 
 within the meaning of the Act. In a garden, 
 as elsewhere. Art has the power by selection, 
 accentuation, grouping, and the removal of 
 defects or superfluities, to intensify and surpass 
 the beauty of nature, thus reaching the ideal.^ 
 This power, being higher than natural law, 
 is a kind of witchcraft ; but it is not the kind 
 of which I speak. Art has another function 
 also : it is concerned not only with the scene 
 but with the mind of the beholder, for more 
 than half of what we see comes from the mind. 
 Here then at last we have found the garden- 
 magic of Italy, in the domain of Psychology — 
 that occult science which deals in speUs, 
 exorcisms and bewitchnaents, in familiar spirits, 
 in malign and beneficent influences and formulas 
 of alchemy ; that dim untrodden under-world 
 
 ^ The ideal is a concept formed by the perception of differ- 
 ences and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of such 
 difierences to the furthest point within the horizon of apparent 
 possibility. This point, or terminus, is the ideal, but it is 
 far short of the horizon of Nature, which is always transcending 
 it. — ^W. James, " Principles of Psychology," i. 508. 
 
GARDEN-MAGIC 49 
 
 from which Shakespeare and Wagner drew 
 their shadowy legions, which will yet inspire 
 the great poets, artists and musicians of the 
 age to come. If we use the witchery that 
 here lies ready to our hand, the garden, like 
 the work of a great painter, may "create a 
 mood" ; may throw over the soul the spell of 
 a persisting present, unpursued by a ravenous 
 past, the child's illusion of an harmonious 
 universe, free from the discords of sorrow 
 or unkindness, from the dominion of iron 
 Necessity or of scornful Chance ; where fore- 
 thought may colour the future with rainbow 
 images of spring and hope, and memory like 
 a fountain pool that has cast off the dark days 
 of winter can reflect nothing but flowers and 
 sunshine and deep blue sky. We shall hear 
 an echo of felicities older than mankind in the 
 birds' most ancient song, shall know the thrill 
 of numbers and see in the tender, tranquil 
 eyes of the flowers, their drooping heads or 
 pouted lips, other beings like ourselves who 
 may return the sympathy we feel.' We shaU 
 
 ^ Personification involves the ascription of feelings. 
 L'Evfique (" La Science du Beau," 1872, pp. 93-4) makesawave 
 of affection for the object part of the emotion of beauty, and 
 I thinli- that in one's own garden there is an illusion of a return 
 wave. The pleasure we derive from colour, scent, and song 
 in the garden is a bye-product of evolution, due to that simi- 
 larity of environment and of the power to respond to it which 
 has cast our senses almost in the same mould with those of 
 the insects and birds ; and the significance of the fact is that 
 life is one and man a part of nature, not a supernatural being 
 
 4 
 
50 ON GARDENS 
 
 share with all living things that sense of union 
 with Nature which is the very essence of pleasure 
 — in the radiant happiness of the plants whose 
 flowering is the expression of a desire to live, 
 a sigh of well-being, a smile of thankfulness, 
 a hymn of praise, whose blossom is as laughter 
 and whose perfume is as song, and the sight 
 of all these smiling faces will teach us that life 
 is a splendid gift, not a vale of tears but a deU 
 of roses. We shall learn the philosophy of 
 the plants, which have ceased from their 
 wanderings, which do not seek to shiver in 
 the cold shadow of impending ill, to groan 
 in anticipation under evils which are beyond 
 remedy and evils which may never arise, to 
 guard against the future by building up an 
 organ of instability, an organ of suffering, 
 but have made their peace with Destiny, 
 resigning themselves in hope and trustfulness 
 to their winter sleep. We shall learn the 
 inmost secrets of the garden, the hidden rela- 
 tions, the waves of mysterious affinity that flow 
 between these flowers that cannot thrive except 
 in the company of their kind, the green thoughts 
 of the trees whose leaves are trembling at 
 the sough of the distant rain. Spring's first 
 "faint beatings in the calyx of the rose." 
 
 who has been suddenly intruded into a garden. The discovery 
 that some plants have rudimentary sense-organs, and that 
 the cell nucleus is capable of memory and desire, must re- 
 volutionise the whole science of psychology. 
 
GARDEN-MAGIC 51 
 
 So, as time goes on, the glamour of the garden 
 shall deepen, till we know that it is a common- 
 wealth and that we are citizens with the rest. 
 The great trees cast their shade over the garden, 
 which shields them from the woodman's axe ; 
 man gives in labour what he takes in beauty, 
 and every bush and flower has its appointed 
 task, for there are some that feed the minstrels 
 or find their dole of honey for the marriage- 
 making bees, that watch through the midnight 
 hours or guard the thickets with thorns and 
 prickly blades and snares of coiling cables ; 
 and some there are that worship the Sun God, 
 following in silent adoration his progress through 
 the sky, and some that breathe a perfumed 
 prayer at morn or even, when he scatters 
 from his chariot the soft roses of dawn, or 
 returns like a conqueror to his flaming city 
 in the west. Thus it seems that one interest 
 binds the garden together, one desire runs 
 through it, a common purpose animates the 
 whole: to dream through the dreary winter, 
 when the petals of the cloud roses are drifting 
 down in sheets of chilly blossom, when the 
 boughs of the leafless woodland are heavy 
 with crystal fruit, then, when the dream is 
 over, to wake again, to creep out from the 
 darkness, to bask in the sunshine of another 
 year. 
 
 But if we are to call up this new world of 
 mists and shadows to replace the illusions of 
 
52 ON GARDENS 
 
 the old, it will be necessary to face the problems 
 of psychology, and in the first place to analyse 
 the pleasure which the beauty of a garden gives. 
 There is no truth but the whole truth concerning 
 an object, both in its countless aspects and 
 manifold relations, and what we call the garden 
 is only a single, fugitive appearance, an in- 
 finitesimal part of the whole ; not a reality, 
 but a phantom which we mistake for a reaUty. 
 It is not even a part of the truth, aU we know 
 with certainty of such existences in the outer 
 world being that in every quality and feature 
 they are utterly unlike our conception of them. 
 A rose is neither red nor sweet though we may 
 think it so. To the old man, time and space 
 and colour are not the same as they are to 
 the boy. For the tiny creatures that swarm 
 in a dewdrop and may swim in thousands 
 through the eye of a needle, the garden has no 
 existence ; it is beyond the grasp of their 
 minds, beyond the ken of their senses, further 
 off than the clustering suns of the Milky Way. 
 For the bUnd man it is a dull place ; not a 
 sight, but a sequence of touches with feet and 
 hands, a succession of perfumes, of lightly 
 echoed sounds, of the perception of obstacles 
 and open spaces ; a place of soft turf, warm 
 sunshine and whispering breezes. The thing 
 itself with him is the chain of touches, the other 
 impressions are only signs of the thing : if you 
 could show him the garden he would not 
 
WORLDS OF ILLUSION 53 
 
 recognise it. For the smaller winged in- 
 habitants of the flower-land, which make ten 
 or fifteen thousand wing strokes in a single 
 second and are supposed to be conscious of 
 every one, time moves by another measure, 
 the day is a twelve-month long and gravity 
 a restraint as hght as it may be to the dwellers 
 upon Mars. To their eyes, which reach beyond 
 the violet rays, the world is fuU of colour 
 which we may not see, to their ears of rhythms 
 which we may not hear, calls and love-songs 
 and shriU alarms and rustling music of unfolding 
 leaves and pistol-shots of bursting bud or 
 faUing berry ; and other senses they may 
 have (4) which the heart cannot even conceive, 
 differing from ours as Ught from heat or sound 
 from motion. They indeed must find it such 
 a wonderland as we have dreamed, an en- 
 chanted forest of fearful dehghts, where trees 
 a thousand feet high are laden with flowers of 
 incredible magnificence, roses great as arbours, 
 snowy cupolas and purple obelisks, spires of 
 red-crocketed blossom, peals of azure beUs ; 
 with cup-hke flowers that offer fairy foods — 
 ambrosia, and draughts of nectar and chalices 
 of poison ; where skiffs with painted sails 
 come floating down the breeze, and nets of 
 corded silk are gemmed with globes of rainbow 
 crystal, and in the green light of the thickets 
 lurk forms of unearthly beauty or of uttermost 
 horror — dragons in jewelled mail or burnished 
 
 4* 
 
54 ON GARDENS 
 
 armour, horned dinosaurs, and filthy creeping 
 monsters ; where the fljdng moments flow 
 with a soft gUding, Uke weary watches of the 
 night, and giant magicians pass onward with 
 imperceptible motion, slow as the snowy clouds 
 that steal through the summer sky/ 
 
 To human beings, from whom all these 
 marvels are hid, the beauty of a garden is 
 less enthralling, the pleasure less acute. It 
 is what is termed a massive and soothing 
 pleasure, built up of many strands of feeling. 
 
 ' Xhe object- world of the insects differs strangely from 
 ours. It is a miracle-world in which nothing happens by- 
 law, in which the extraordinary freshness of sensation makes 
 sensuous beauty greater, though symbolic beauty be less. 
 Scent is the dominant sense of the insects, enabUng them to 
 distinguish not only a greater number of odours, but the 
 direction, motion, and even the shape of the objects from 
 which such odours spring. Their sight is supposed to be 
 quicker than ours for movement, but less distinct for form. 
 The ultra-violet rays, which with human beings are absorbed 
 by the lens, constitute, as Lubbock points out, for some insects 
 a new and unimaginable colour, dififering from violet as green 
 from blue or red from orange, and if these rays enter into 
 the composition of white light and the red are absent, the 
 general aspect of nature cannot be the same. The relative 
 value of colours may also be changed. With our eyes the 
 sensitiveness to green is three hundred and seventy times 
 as great as that for red : with the insects, for all we know, 
 some other colour may be raised to the higher power. Further, 
 it is possible that some insects possessing organs the use of 
 which is unknown may have a sixth sense. Between forty 
 thousand vibrations of the air in a second, giving the highest 
 audible sound, and four hundred million vibrations of the 
 ether, giving the sensation of red, there is room for many 
 unimaginable senses. 
 
BEAUTY IN THE GARDEN 55 
 
 There is the pride of the eye in colour and 
 curving lines and dappled light and shade ; 
 the suggestion of pleasing rest and coolness ; 
 the intellectual pleasure of the processes of 
 comparison and deduction ; the train of as- 
 sociation which calls up memories of other 
 gardens, of other trees and flowers ; the appeal 
 to the sympathetic sentiments of power and 
 happiness/ whereby we rejoice in another's 
 good fortune, finding delight in the vigour 
 and weU-being of plant and herb and tree. 
 Further, there is the gratification of the 
 instinctive sympathy of reason, where the 
 scene has the qualities of appropriateness, 
 diversity in unity, proportion, symmetry or 
 balance, orderly progression, aU of which come 
 under the head of design, or at least of order 
 and fitness. In every well-planned garden, 
 as indeed in every work of art, there are many 
 harmonies of appropriateness — in relation, con- 
 venience, proportion or scale, form, colour, 
 historic style — so subtle as to escape individual 
 notice ; ^ but these come within the halo of 
 
 1 See the writer's unpublished essay on beauty, in which 
 it is shown that in addition to the recognised elements of 
 aesthetic pleasure, there are in the mind natural sympathies 
 of power, freedom, happiness, and reason, and emotions or 
 passions of ideality and personality. 
 
 2 It is to these harmonies that Michael Angelo must have 
 been referring when he spoke of spoiling his music. Many 
 things which do not come within the field of our ordinary 
 consciousness are recorded in. the lower conscious centres. 
 See Forel, " The Senses of Insects," p. 298. 
 
56 ON GARDENS 
 
 obscurely felt relations, and being fused 
 together rise above the threshold of con- 
 sciousness in a vague and general sense of 
 ordered beauty. Art's highest appeal to 
 emotion is in the region of sub-consciousness. 
 Up to this point we have dealt only with 
 the impressions which reach us through the 
 avenue of sight, but the influence of the other 
 senses in a garden is not so trifling as might 
 at first appear. It has often been observed 
 how the impressiveness of natural scenery is 
 heightened by some sound in harmony with 
 the landscape, by the scream of the eagle in 
 the mountains, the howling of wolves in the 
 forest, by the goatherd's piping, the carols of 
 harvest home, the song of the nightingale, 
 the trembhng music of the vesper bell. Alison 
 considers such sounds to be sublime ^ or 
 beautiful only from association, the mind 
 connecting them with certain quahties and 
 certain scenes : but the power they have over us 
 would rather seem to be due to the suggestion of 
 life and force and movement, to the tightened 
 grip of reality, the shock of surprise, to some- 
 
 1 The sublime is an emotion raised by overwhelming power 
 or magnitude or duration of time ; that is to say, overwhelming 
 in comparison -with our own insignificance. There is thus 
 sublimity of power, freedom, height, length, vastness, and 
 duration, which may or may not be mixed with beauty. In 
 the presence of the sublime, the consciousness of self is lost 
 (Spencer, i. 231, ii. 438 ; pars. 98, 439), and all irrelevant and 
 trivial ideas are excluded. 
 
BEAUTY IN THE GARDEN 57 
 
 thing which Nature here uses with a success 
 beyond the reach of orator or rhetorician — the 
 device of impersonification. The landscape, as 
 you gaze upon it, has found a sudden voice. 
 It is speaking — ^telling you the wild delight 
 of savage freedom, the fervour of the chase, 
 the careless Eden of the upland pastures, 
 the thankfulness of harvest, the rapture of 
 requited love, the tranquil sadness of the dying 
 day. So lofty a string of emotion may not 
 be stirred in a garden, where sublimity, if it 
 be reached at aU, can only be the sublime of 
 nature beyond the boundaries ; but the peaceful 
 murmur of a fountain placed at the climax 
 of the scene may heighten its prevailing note, 
 the rush of water will give life, and statue or 
 fountain masks may add the crowning interest 
 of personality. Other sounds and the stirrings 
 of other senses — the warbling of birds, the 
 sighing of the wind in the tree-tops, the myriad- 
 tongued murmur of the lime-blossoms, the 
 perfumes of free-scented flowers, the soft and 
 springy turf, warm sun and breaths of vagrant 
 air — each of these has its share in building up 
 the impression we receive.' The eyes, owing 
 
 ^ The softness of turf gives a light heart, and sounds 
 which repeat themselves, such as the bubbling of a fountain, 
 the cawing of rooks, the song of the cuckoo, strike a note of 
 peacefulness. The total impression of a garden is built up 
 not only of sensation interpreted by perception, but also of 
 sentiment and emotion, and the interest of the house, the 
 beauty of the landscape as seen from the garden, the character 
 
58 ON GARDENS 
 
 to the variety of their functions and the power 
 of deahng with many objects at once, must 
 always be the dominant sense, but being 
 on duty for fully sixteen hours out of the 
 twenty-four, they are apt to fall into a kind of 
 waking slumber. The ear, on the other hand, 
 has so much leisure that it is alive to every 
 sound, and having originally been employed 
 to give warning of danger, as is shown by 
 the infant's fear of noise, it instantly awakes 
 the mind. Thus aroused, the brain uses the 
 eyes to greater advantage, selecting among a 
 countless multitude of new impressions those 
 which bear upon the subject of thought. The 
 sense of smell has also its peculiar province, 
 a strange power of conjuring up the past,^ 
 
 and historical associations of the surrounding country, even 
 the circumstances under which one first visited the place, 
 have a share in shaping it. Such an impression is an indivisible 
 whole and the sentiment attached to it makes it distinctive 
 as a chord in music. — 
 
 ^ In addition to the pleasure of sensation, there is a vague 
 and baffling suggestion of other delights. This is probably 
 due to re-representation below the threshold of the joj^s which 
 other gardens have given. As with wild animals a certain 
 scent will render nascent in idea the motor changes which 
 accompany the running down, seizing, killing and eating of 
 the prey, so in this case the memory of other experiences is 
 stirred, but so faintly that it eludes our grasp, Uke a name 
 we cannot quite recall. Sometimes the actual scene may 
 be reproduced. Compare Spencer's " Psychology," 1870, 
 i. 61, 191, 308, 484; ii. 638 (pars. 22, 76, 140, 214, 536). 
 There seems also to be a suggestion of flavour, the very 
 message the flowers are sending to the bees ; and indeed 
 
BEAUTY IN THE GARDEN 59 
 
 being bound up with memory because at some 
 early stage of racial development it has been, 
 like the sense of taste, necessary for the pro- 
 tection of life ; and we shall therefore carry 
 away a lasting recollection of the garden, if 
 round the fountain of which we have spoken 
 the air is heavy with the scent of some particular 
 flower, or succession of flowers, if " the woodbine 
 spices are wafted abroad and the musk of 
 the rose is blown." But the chief work of the 
 other senses in a garden is to heighten the 
 feeling of reaUty, without which we cannot 
 really tmderstand nor know nor enter into 
 possession, for as in reading and even in thinking 
 we are assisted to grasp the meaning of the 
 symbols by mental images of the feeling of 
 articulation and of the sound of the words, 
 so these sensory impressions of sound, scent 
 
 smell must be considered as taste at a distance, just as sight 
 is distant touch. Grant Allen points to the dwindled olfactory- 
 lobes as proof that smell is an atrophied sense which has 
 outlived its principal uses, and considers that it now 3delds 
 relatively large emotional waves and relatively small in- 
 tellectual information ; in fact, that it has sunk into a senti- 
 mental old age. Many flowers which are wind fertilised exhale 
 perfume, and according to Maeterlinck the original function 
 of perfumes is unknown. I venture to suggest that it was 
 to lessen evaporation, scented ai? being opaque to the heat 
 rays. If perfumes are to be described by poets or scientists, 
 new terms must be invented ; in the rose alone seventeen 
 different varieties of scent have been distinguished by experts, 
 and to find a proper epithet for the odour of the box leaf we 
 should have to combine the adjectives warm, sweet, bitter, 
 clean, axomatic. 
 
6o ON GARDENS 
 
 and touch tighten our grasp of the object 
 and adding the criterion of reality, the power 
 to inflict pleasure or pain, make it part of the 
 one ultimate fact, the consciousness of our 
 own existence. With the eyes a double im- 
 pression at slightly varying angles gives a 
 striking perception of sohd effect, and how 
 much stronger is the conviction of truth when 
 we have approached the scene from so many, 
 from such widely different sides ; when the 
 senses in conjunction, like a party of experts 
 in a laboratory, have tested it for light, colour, 
 form, motion, space-distribution, distance, and 
 magnitude ; for the freshness of the air, the 
 chemical constituents of flower and grass and 
 tree ; for the signs of sunshine, wind and turf ; 
 for the intensity, the volume, continuance, 
 tone, clearness, harmony, rhythm, character 
 of the sounds, and the evidence they give 
 of distance, direction and movement. 
 
 Thus the other organs of sense combine to 
 strengthen belief and possession, to heighten 
 the enjoyment of the eyes ; pleasure gives 
 an added force to energy and vitality, and the 
 whole man is more aUve ; beauty rouses emotion, 
 emotion unlocks the door to imagination, which 
 is set free to wander in a world of dreams. 
 Thus in the flowing tide of happiness, which has 
 as much power to intensify reality and impres- 
 sionabihty as melancholy has to diminish them 
 (5), the constraints of trouble or pre-occupa- 
 
BEAUTY IN THE GARDEN 6i 
 
 tion or self-consciousness are swept away, and 
 following the general law that one great plea- 
 sure fires all the pleasurable sensibilities, the 
 delights of the intellect, of society, music, 
 poetry, even of food, exercise, and rest, are 
 nowhere so vivid as in a garden. The golden 
 lesson of Psychology is among the many 
 selves to choose the best, and in such surround- 
 ings a new character is put upon the individual, 
 sympathy is exalted, aU the powers of the 
 mind are at their brightest, and the acuteness 
 of feeUng is in itself a joy. Ruskin (6) and 
 Alison make too much of raising a train of 
 imaginative thought, which may heighten but 
 cannot cause the enjoyment of beauty that 
 we feel at the first glance ; and indeed the 
 delight which landscape gives is due chiefly to 
 the elevation of mood, lifting the mind out of 
 those gloomy realms where sorrow and suffering 
 or disappointment or anxious foreboding have 
 gathered round them the spectres of past 
 unhappiness, above this object universe of 
 double-faced pleasure and pain, to a world of 
 sunshine where Beauty reigns over the shadows 
 of the happy hours, and every shadow is a 
 friend. 
 
Ill 
 
 It wiU be asked perhaps what scientific basis 
 there is for aU these pretty theories, and in 
 order to prove that the danger is not that 
 one should be too imaginative but that one 
 should not be imaginative enough, I must turn 
 for a moment to the physical process of which 
 consciousness is the other side. The, higher 
 centres of sensation in the cerebral hemispheres 
 are store-houses of old impressions (7), and those 
 which have often been in action together 
 become connected (8) : we have therefore, 
 answering to each cluster of qualities and 
 relations frequently met with in the outer 
 world, an organised group or plexus of cells 
 and fibres in the brain, of which if any part 
 is stirred the wave of nervous excitement 
 will tend to spread to the rest. Let a fresh 
 cluster of a kind already known unexpectedly 
 offer itself — say the view of a garden — and 
 the recognition of it as belonging to a particular 
 class will involve the faint revival in memory 
 or idea of (i) the aggregate of past impressions, 
 and (ii) the knowledge grouped about them ; 
 in this case all that gardens have meant to 
 
 62 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS 6^, 
 
 countless generations of human beings, the 
 flower language of love, flowers as the universal 
 symbol of beauty and motive of ornament, 
 the pathos of the faded rose, the Idyll of 
 Ausonius and Ben Jonson's rendering of it, 
 the garden lore of Herrick, Vaughan, and 
 Herbert, the flower imagery of Milton and 
 Shakespeare, of Keats and SheUey. These 
 ideas, or others like them, wiU be in the back- 
 ground of consciousness (9), not in the focus of 
 intellectual sight but in the " fringe " or " halo " 
 of obscurely felt relations ; belonging rather 
 to feeUng than to knowledge (10) ; below the 
 horizon themselves, but rolling up above it a 
 mist of sentiment out of which at any moment 
 trains of conscious thought may spring. 
 
 This is not aU. The centres which deal with 
 sensation and emotion being the same, a faint 
 stirring of past experiences involves also a 
 more vivid renewal of (iii) the emotion common 
 to such past experiences and (iv) of other 
 feelings of pleasure which have been accidentally 
 associated with them.^ In our garden melody 
 
 ^ Spencer's " Psychology," i. 492 ; ii. 594, 641 (pars. 216, 
 519, 537). In this revival of other associated feelings of 
 pleasure, it must be presumed that the senses of hearing and 
 smell play an important part, these having greater power to 
 gather round them accretions of mood and sentiment, though 
 impressions of sight are more easily reproduced in memory. 
 Every one has noticed the feeling roused by the cawing of 
 rooks, the perfume of new-mown hay, the voice of an old 
 friend heard unexpectedly. 
 
64 ON GARDENS 
 
 of delight we have thus in addition to the 
 gratification which is found in the exercise 
 of eye and ear and hrain, in the prospect of 
 investigation and comparison, in the calling 
 up past impressions crowned with a garland 
 of sentiment and knowledge, and the troupe 
 of pleasurable emotions which dance attendance 
 upon them, — the echo of a counterpart ; a re- 
 representation of the fresh gladness of spring, 
 the joy and wonder of a child's heart, the 
 ease and freedom of other hours spent in the 
 garden, the happiness experienced in the com- 
 panionship of parents, playmates and friends, 
 sympathy felt in the pleasure of others ; and 
 beyond these chords, mysterious overtones, 
 fainter echoes from the immeasurable past, 
 dim ancestral reminiscences of emotions stirred 
 by the freer life of mountain and river, of the 
 forest and of the chase (ii). Even this is not 
 all, though already the process goes beyond 
 comprehension and almost beyond belief. The 
 reproduction in idea of past feelings tends to 
 revive, not only others accidentally connected 
 with them, but (v) all others of the same 
 class (12). So, the masses of plexuses in 
 the brain which deal with impressions inter- 
 mixed with pleasurable emotion being in- 
 timately connected and the nervous discharge 
 following the lines of least resistance, other 
 feelings of beauty and happiness are partially 
 aroused, there is a dim representation, vague, 
 
BEAUTY OF AGE 65 
 
 massive, multitudinous, of all kinds of pleasure, 
 and an indefinable sense of well-being (13). 
 
 To these delights of a garden age may add 
 a further interest which can hardly be dis- 
 tinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least 
 with those who have the historic instinct, is 
 always longing to be connected with the past, 
 and dreading for itself confinement upon the 
 plane of time, delights in evidences of the 
 long continuance of nations, families and in- 
 stitutions, in hale and vigorous old age, in 
 long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's 
 wheel, the " scornful dominion of Accident." 
 RestfuLness is the prevaihng note of an old 
 garden ; in this fairy world of echo and 
 suggestion where the Present never comes but 
 to commune with the Past, we feel the.glamour 
 of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and 
 secure which has grown and blossomed as the 
 rose. How few there are who are incapable 
 of feeling the mysterious appeal of such a 
 place — of the scenes which reflect upon us the 
 passion and the happiness of bygone genera- 
 tions, the statues which gleam out under the 
 deepening speU of the twilight like phantoms 
 of old-world greatness, the still pools that 
 slumber in the sunshine and call our spirits 
 to their dreamland of abiding peace, the rippling 
 music of the fountain, hke triUs of elfin laughter, 
 and the hoarse water-voices that are hasting 
 with passionate earnestness to the everlasting 
 
 5 
 
66 ON GARDENS 
 
 sea. But beyond all this there is a deeper 
 mystery. In such scenes there is the same 
 elusive suggestiveness that is found in the 
 perfume of the flowers. That which is inter- 
 esting is real (14), and the old garden is very 
 real. It has the power of fixing attention, it 
 grips you by the sleeve, it is instinct with a 
 silent eloquence ; you feel in the Spiritualist 
 phrase that it is " seeking to communicate," to 
 open vistas into the past, that it has a secret 
 to unfold, a message to deliver. What then is 
 this secret of the old-world garden ? This, — 
 that it knows us well. We have come back to 
 an earlier home, to scenes which are strangely 
 familiar to us, to the life of former generations 
 whose being was one with ours. Every living 
 creature is adapted to its environment by 
 changes in brain structure produced either by 
 the natural selection of accidental variations 
 or by multitudinous repetition of the same 
 impressions and the same actions. It is this 
 harmony with the surroundings which we feel 
 upon entering an old house or garden ; vague 
 ancestral memories are faintly stirred ^ and the 
 sentiment which may attach to objects that 
 have been habitual sources of enjoyment to 
 
 ^ I think that instinct in animals will some day be explained 
 as inherited memory in the form of idea ; that is to say, an 
 inherited tendency for a certain tract in the brain to react 
 to a particular stimulus. Spencer draws practically no dis- 
 tinction between memory, idea, and desire (" Psychology," 
 par. ZI3). 
 
BEAUTY OF AGE 67 
 
 generation after generation (15). If by long 
 hereditary connection pleasure has thus become 
 associated with a child's doll (16), it may be 
 with a flower or even with a garden ; and more 
 particularly with a garden that represents 
 the ideal world of our forefathers, reflecting 
 the care and forethought, the high unselfish 
 endeavour, the ordered symmetry, the simple 
 quaint formality of their lives. Architecture, 
 far more than poetry or any of the sister arts, 
 is a " strong conqueror of the forgetfulness 
 of men." History and romance may leave 
 us cold and unconvinced — the past of which 
 we read or hear is far away ; but let the primor- 
 dial sense of touch extended by sight be brought 
 into action, with its stronger grip of reality,^ 
 its greater precision, its fuller information — 
 let our hands handle and our eyes behold the 
 homes of oux ancestors, and instantly we are 
 back in the Ufe of earlier days. We are dealing 
 no longer with mental images — homeless wan- 
 derers in the world of space disowned and 
 rejected by all around — ^but with the thing 
 itself ; thoughts which are almost memories 
 flash upon the mind, a host of associated facts 
 take their places in the scene, and before us 
 there rises the majestic pageant of the past. 
 
 1 Those things are real which are judged by our senses to 
 belong, like the body, to the world of space ; that is to say, 
 not to the world of things as they are, but to the world of 
 things as they feel. 
 
68 ON GARDENS 
 
 It has been observed of the sham rivers 
 introduced into Enghsh parks by Capability 
 Brown, that when once the two ends have 
 been discovered, they have lost for ever their 
 beauty and their power to please. As con- 
 tinuance is part of the idea of a river, so it 
 is of a garden, and no new pleasure-ground 
 will satisfy the mind unless we may see it 
 both as it is and as it is to be, when the 
 hedges have shot up into fortress walls of 
 green, and flowering weeds have rooted them- 
 selves in the crannies, and the lichen is creep- 
 ing over the balustrades in a slow tide of 
 curdled foam; when the robes of Nymph and 
 Naiad are damasked with gold and silver 
 blooms, and old associations are gathering 
 in the garden, thickly as autumn leaves. A 
 garden, like a building, must be stable in 
 appearance as well as in reality, must have 
 the restfulness of assured position ; the glory 
 of youth is in its promise as of age in its 
 memories. If the scheme has no air of per- 
 manence, no wall of defence against the gipsy 
 horde of briars and brambles which is waiting 
 to break into the forbidden land, to pitch its 
 tents on the paths, and riot over the lawns, 
 and pluck down the flower-vases ; if it mourns 
 an unsettled or a gluttonous age, which takes 
 no heed of the morrow ; if it despairs of the 
 future, preaching the uncertainty of life and 
 the uselessness of effort — the cup of beauty 
 
SENSE OF PERMANENCE 69 
 
 it offers will be tainted with sadness.. In our 
 flower-fastness there must be solid evidence of 
 lime and stone that the labour of the builder 
 has been for others; for after-generations who 
 shall mix its music with their joys and sorrows, 
 with their hopes of the future and their 
 memories of the past. 
 
 Whenever we look at a picture, we are 
 entering a new world of imagination, leaving 
 the real and turning to the ideal. So it should 
 be with a garden, and to proclaim it boldly 
 as a kingdom of romance we may people it 
 with figures of Olympian deities, with virtues 
 and graces, wood-nymphs and dell-nymphs, 
 dryads and satyrs. Even the topiary works 
 of the Renaissance, the green ships and helmets, 
 giants, dragons and centaurs, had something 
 of reason to recommend them, for by their 
 very strangeness they would be likely to 
 compel attention, to stir imagination, to 
 strengthen memory, to banish the consciousness 
 of self and all trivial or obsessing thoughts. 
 The frontiers of this fairy kingdom must be 
 clearly marked by ramparts strong enough to 
 prevent intrusion, but not in such a way as 
 to shut out the distant landscape. One of the 
 great lessons of psychology is the importance 
 of trifles, and when all our labour is done 
 we may find the eye returning again and 
 again, not to fountain or lawn or parterre, 
 but to some object so trivial that it can be 
 
 5*- 
 
70 ON GARDENS 
 
 hidden by a single finger of the outstretched 
 hand ; some tiny cloud of blue which teUs 
 of a far-off mountain, some gleam of distant 
 water half seen between the trees, or green 
 depth of a forest glade. The fascination of 
 such sights, whether due to the excitement 
 of wonder, the ancestral call of wild nature 
 (17), or the charm of mystery in a landscape 
 where something should always be left to fancy 
 and to desire (18), is too strong to be resisted ; 
 the whole lay-out should be subordinated to 
 them, and on no account should they be cut 
 off by a rigid boundary, the " good high waU 
 for choice " of the Enghsh architects. 
 
 The garden, like every other work of art, 
 should have a climax, which may be em- 
 phasized by moving water or by reflection, 
 by higher Hght and deeper shadow, by colour, 
 elaboration in design, or by sculpture which 
 adds the charm of personality ; and whatever 
 this focus of interest may be, whether it stirs 
 the emotion of sublimity by the prospect of 
 mountain amphitheatre or plunging cataract 
 or measureless infinity of plain, the emotion 
 of beauty by immemorial cypresses, by lake or 
 river valley, blue pool or fountain basin, it must 
 be presented with what is known as " economy 
 of the recipient's attention " (19) ; that is to 
 say, without the addition of features which 
 disturb or detract. If a picture be complete, 
 everything that is added is something taken 
 
ARTISTIC PRESENTMENT 71 
 
 away. The Law of Novelty will teach us not 
 to fritter away the effect in half glimpses, but 
 to deliver it with unsuUied freshness, like a 
 knock-down blow straight between the eyes ; 
 for it is a fundamental principle that no second 
 occurrence of any great stimulus can ever be 
 fuUy equal to the first. The power of novelty 
 to " quicken observation, sharpen sensation and 
 exalt sentiment " (20) is as marked as that of 
 familiarity to throw a veil over ugliness (21). 
 Surprise may add to novelty the shock of 
 contradiction, and if care has been taken to 
 make the expectation less than the reality, 
 we shall have the added thrill of wonder. 
 Indeed, in every great garden there should 
 be some element of wonder or surprise, if 
 only to make recollection more vivid (22). 
 We shall learn, again, from the Law of 
 Relativity that as the emotions of beauty, 
 sublimity, novelty and freedom represent in 
 each case a change in consciousness from 
 the less to the more pleasing, so either of 
 them may be heightened by contrast, that 
 is to say, according to circumstances, by an 
 ugly, commonplace, monotonous, or confined 
 approach. In the opposition of sunshine to 
 the coolness of shade and water, another 
 principle is involved, for the actual bodily 
 discomfort heightens reality, and the mind 
 attaching little value to that which has cost 
 it nothing, we shall do well, though Bacon is 
 
72 ON GARDENS 
 
 against us, to buy our shade by passing through 
 a few yards of sun. Contrast again may take 
 another form which brings it under the head 
 of harmony ; that is to say, the opposition to 
 each other of pleasing quahties which it thereby 
 makes more distinct and noticeable, as of 
 lofty terrace to low parterre, of studied order 
 to wayward negligence, of massive strength to 
 tender grace. 
 
 Such a harmony of contrast is especially 
 valuable at the garden boundary. For this 
 reason the mossy pillars of the woodland, 
 where it beats against the garden, are to be 
 wreathed with a wild tangle of ivy and vine, 
 of hop or honeysuckle or convolvulus, and the 
 trees themselves to be such as affect a rough 
 and rugged form, gnarled oaks with a hydra- 
 brood of writhing arms or rugged elms or knotty 
 chestnuts ; for this reason we are to avoid a 
 multiph cation of enclosures, which destroys the 
 background of the picture, throwing back 
 too far from the house the contrast between the 
 wild riot of rebellious nature and the Roman 
 peace of art. Bacon's gardens of the months 
 may be suited to the promenades of a city 
 park, but are not to a private nor even to a 
 royal garden. If spaciousness is desired, it wiU 
 best be obtained by carr3dng forward the axial 
 line, or main alley, along a canal or cascade 
 or tapis vert of green turf, a plan equally appro- 
 priate for the manor-house and for the palace. 
 
ORDER AND VARIETY 73 
 
 Straight lines, according to Ruskin, are 
 valuable because they suggest restraint and 
 set off by their monotony the freedom and 
 variety of natural curves : it foUows that 
 flowers will be fairer in formal beds, wild 
 foliage when opposed to massive masonry. 
 Indeed, irregularity and diversity naturally 
 confuse and bewilder us, having no beauty of 
 their own, but only by contrast with a back- 
 ground of order and unity. Symmetry, which 
 gives a sense of rest, will be the law of the 
 garden, the human mind being prejudiced in 
 favour of simplicity and rhythmic recurrence (23), 
 but symmetry too exact is a characteristic of 
 dead rather than of living things, as in the latter 
 it is never quite perfect and is disguised by 
 movement. With gardens, as with buildings, 
 life and freedom are given to the plan by 
 sUght aberrations from the square which can 
 hardly be perceived unless they are sought 
 for (24). It is surprising how much real free- 
 dom is wrapped up in the old formality. The 
 circular endings of the terraces at Hampton 
 Court and Helmsley conceal the awkward 
 return of the paths which run into them. The 
 star-shaped parterre in the Colonna garden 
 at Rome covers a corner entrance. The plans 
 of Caserta, Palazzo Borghese, Isola Bella, 
 the Vatican and Boboli gardens, Levens and 
 Melbourne in England, show how easy it is to 
 disguise a change of direction. At ViUa d'Este 
 
74 ON GARDENS 
 
 the designer has twisted the great descent of 
 his central alley some yards to the left, caring 
 Uttle that the squalid houses of the town 
 should encroach upon the corner of his garden 
 and even cross its middle line. At Fenarola, 
 a late eighteenth-century garden near Brescia, 
 a bolder divergence from rectitude is concealed 
 by what one can only describe as a heartless 
 fraud. Behind the house is a formal ascent 
 on the hillside, interrupted in the centre by 
 an octagon, the lower flights of steps being 
 steeper than those above, so that it is impos- 
 sible to see both series at once. Within this 
 octagon, masked by the sweep of a double 
 stairway, the axial line changes very con- 
 siderably, to suit the plane of the higher hill- 
 side ; but the visitor only discovers the trick 
 on the high-road, half a mile from the house, 
 and drives away with an uncomfortable feeling 
 that the architect has been laughing at him. 
 
 Of statues in the garden, Bacon has written 
 that they are for state and magnificence, but 
 nothing to the true pleasure of it ; and Temple 
 could see httle in them, or rather in the stone 
 of which they are made, beyond a suggestion 
 of coolness in the summer heat ; yet from this 
 faint and damning praise we may appeal to 
 Wagner's great rule that as far as possible 
 all the arts should be used in conjunction, and 
 to Spencer's judgment that the highest aesthetic 
 feeling is roused by the exercise of many powers 
 
THE IMAGINATIVE IDEAL 75 
 
 (25). Let sculpture add yet another appeal to 
 emotion, and the pleasure stirred by beauty in 
 a garden may rise from massive to acute. It is 
 not only that the statues will set off the garden ; 
 we have to consider also that the garden will 
 set off the statues, crowning them with a 
 garland of beauty they could not have else- 
 where. Further, there is the opinion already 
 so much insisted upon, that the designer should 
 aim at the ideal, not merely at that low form 
 of ideahty which goes beyond nature in the 
 perfection of shape and colour and arrange- 
 ment, of leaf and blossom, turf and tree, but 
 at the nobler kind that mixes imagination with 
 beauty, taking us into a new world of romance 
 out of all relation to experience and know- 
 ledge. In a modern picture-gallery, nothing 
 is so refreshing as to turn from the dreary 
 realism of modern landscapes to scenes whose 
 character is boldly asserted by imaginary figures 
 of satyrs or water-nymphs or centaurs. The 
 original function of imagination seems to have 
 been to prepare us in childish play for the 
 battle of Hfe and in manhood to enable us to 
 foresee and guard against future dangers, and 
 hke other useful faculties this requires exercise 
 and pays for it in pleasure. There is thus a 
 natural emotion or passion of ideality, which 
 craves to be satisfied, and every man in his 
 own way must seek the ideal, whether he find it 
 in church or library, in art or music or hterature. 
 
7^ ON GARDENS 
 
 in the cell of the monastery or the cave of the 
 recluse, or in that flowery land where beauty 
 has forgathered from the very ends of the earth. 
 This grown-up playfulness of the imagination 
 finds encouragement in the fact that mankind, 
 who spend a third of their lives in dreamland, 
 give also much of their waking hours to ima- 
 ginary worlds — to the world of appearances, 
 the world of wrong ideas and popular errors 
 and superstitions in which they cannot fail to 
 believe, the various worlds of rehgion, more 
 real in sickness than in health, the worlds of 
 romance, which they only pretend to beheve 
 in. Imagination loves to be employed, and is 
 so absorbed in the interest of ideal relations 
 that it will shut its eyes to minor discrepancies, 
 if only we can avoid the affront of an unneces- 
 sary contradiction ; pleasure again helps to 
 occupy the mind with the object, excluding 
 all hostile influences. We do not see the un- 
 natural lighting in the picture, the supporting 
 blocks in the sculpture, the audience that sits 
 about us : we are not even surprised when 
 great Caesar on the stage declaims in modern 
 English. These enchanted scenes of theatre, 
 opera and academy do not actucilly command 
 beUef, but are real to us whUe we look upon 
 them with the reality of simihtude which has 
 not reached its highest point, exact equahty ; 
 for reahty is only an assertion by the senses 
 and the perception that the object belongs to 
 
THE IMAGINATIVE IDEAL 77 
 
 the outer world of existence and is what it 
 appears to be, while beUef is a settled judg- 
 ment that such an assertion is true. Con- 
 sciousness of the outer world is a very complex 
 thing, depending upon the excitation, not of 
 a single centre, but of a great group or plexus 
 of nerve cells and fibres which varies with 
 every object, and some of these centres may 
 be actually deluded, while in others the sensi- 
 bihty is only partial or latent. The mind 
 cannot deal with more than one idea at a time, 
 though three or four others may lurk in the 
 background of consciousness. Somewhere in 
 the very plexus occupied in putting before us 
 an impression of the scene, is a brain tract 
 which, if fully irradiated, will present us with 
 the profound reflection that all these things are 
 only painted shows ; but its protests have been 
 scouted, its warnings have been disregarded, it 
 has been lulled to sleep. 
 
 But to return to the question of sculpture. 
 Statuary proclaiming the imaginative ideal may 
 strike in the garden a keynote of wonder and 
 romance. The only rules it is necessary to 
 observe are that there should be a background 
 of mystery and obscurity, such as a forest or a 
 great plain or a chain of distant mountains may 
 give ; a well-defined boundary ; a shock of 
 delight or surprise to lift us over the threshold 
 of fact ; an air of grandeur or distinction in 
 the garden itself and in all its parts (26) ; that 
 
78 ON GARDENS 
 
 we should not mix the worlds of romance, but 
 should admit only one supernatural, other cir- 
 cumstances being congruous with it and with 
 each other ; that we should leave as much as 
 possible to the mind, because imagination flies 
 from a finished picture and loves to accept a 
 bare suggestion (27), filling in the details for 
 itself. But even where conditions do not 
 favour the ideal, a pleasure-ground, however 
 small, should have its presiding genius, its 
 Nymph of flower-garden or grove or woodland, 
 or Naiad of the Well, appealing to that other 
 emotion of personality (28) which induces the 
 mind to be ever looking for some being like 
 itself, some face among the rocks or figure in 
 the branching wood, to give a personal inter- 
 pretation to the forces of nature and to feel 
 in lake or mountain or forest the thrill of a 
 hving presence. This emotion, springing per- 
 haps from the primal dread of solitude, forms 
 a fresh bond between man and nature, en- 
 larging the human interest and adding to the 
 appreciation of natural beauty ; and for this 
 reason sculpture in a garden is to be regarded 
 not as an ornament but almost as a necessity, 
 as like that last touch of colour in a picture 
 which^sets the whole canvas in a flame (29). 
 
 Statues of marble seldom look well in Italy, 
 never in England, and of all discords none can 
 be so jarring as to place among the flowers dread- 
 ful forms of disease and suffering, cripples or 
 
STATUES IN THE GARDEN 79 
 
 beggars, or the monstrous dwarfs that look 
 down from the Valmarana garden^ as if to 
 symboUze the starved and stunted hfe of the 
 wall-coping. Art, like laughter, should be the 
 language of happiness, and those who suffer 
 should be silent. Time and Care may wait 
 without the gateway, but Time the ungracious 
 guest, who is always late for the wedding 
 feast and early for the funeral — envious Time 
 the spoiler of the roses, who lays his hateful 
 scythe to the root of the fairest flowers, should 
 have no image, no altar, in the garden, for it 
 is by events and not by the measure of them 
 that we grow old, and hours spent in a garden 
 are stolen from Death and from Time. Only 
 health and strength and beauty are at home 
 among the flowers, shepherds and shepherdesses, 
 youths and maidens in the garb of long ago, 
 portly noblemen in periwigs and armour, 
 warriors and Amazons, nymphs and satyrs, 
 virtues and graces. We may personify the 
 particular place in a figure or bust, taught by 
 the gate at Capua and the pulpit at Ravello,^ 
 
 1 At Vicenza. 
 
 2 The bust on the pulpit, formerly supposed to be a portrait 
 of Sigelgaita the wife of the donor, is now held to be a repre- 
 sentation of the city of Ravello. In classic times, cities were 
 often represented by ideal figures, and the practice was revived 
 in the thirteenth and again in the fifteenth century. II 
 Tribolo placed a bronze statue of a woman, representing the 
 City of Florence, upon his fountain at Castello. At Villa 
 Garzoni there are seventeenth-century statues of Lucca and 
 Florence. 
 
8o ON GARDENS 
 
 or commemorate an historic event by reference 
 as in the cavaUer's garden at Norton Conyers, 
 where a leaden warrior speaks discreetly of 
 the Edgehill fight. We may represent the 
 great elemental forces of nature, the higher 
 motives which sway the human drama, the 
 hoped-for triumph of Love over Death. We 
 may build in some secluded nook a Cupid's 
 altar, where many generations of lovers shall 
 carve their names and make their offerings 
 of flowers, or may set in the four quarters of 
 the garden our pageant of the Seasons : Spring, 
 as a winged youth, primrose-crowned, with 
 flute and flower-embroidered robe ; proud 
 Summer as a weary king ; spendthrift Autumn 
 with open purse and lifted cup and gathered 
 fruit ; hoary Winter having a sealed casket 
 under his foot, his beard hung with icicles and 
 his mantle broidered with double-faced jests. 
 No statue, however bad, should be condemned 
 to a desolate old age. In a decorative landscape 
 the figures are never happy unless they are en- 
 joying themselves, and in a portrait even ugli- 
 ness is rendered charming by the presence of a 
 child, a dog or bird. Diana in a garden should 
 not be without her hound, nor Neptune without 
 his sea-monster ; Mars may be mated with 
 Venus, Flora with Vertumnus, Cupid with 
 Psyche ; every Amazon should have her warrior 
 and every nymph her satyr. 
 I have left almost to the last the magic of 
 
WATER-MAGIC 8i 
 
 water, an element which owing to its change- 
 fulness of form and mood and colour and to 
 the vast range of its effects is ever the principal 
 source of landscape beauty, and has like music 
 a mysterious influence over the mind. It 
 was, perhaps, of this that Wagner was thinking 
 when he wrote that music is like a power of 
 nature which men perceive but do not under- 
 stand. In the sound of rushing or of falling 
 water there is beauty of reflection, for it 
 repeats and by repeating deepens the joy or 
 sorrow of the listener's mood ; but to those 
 who hearken more intently water will speak 
 with a voice of its own, a message of peace 
 or strength or freedom, in the careless timeless 
 ease of its flowing, the lulUng monotony of 
 rhythmic sound, the exhilaration of power. 
 But its chief appeal is through the avenue 
 of sight. Movement representing to the eye 
 the essential character of Hving things,^ the 
 quaUty by which they reveal themselves, just 
 as inanimate objects are recognized by form, 
 a fountain or rivulet will be to the garden a 
 
 * James, " Psychology," ii. 173-4, 89. The eye cannot 
 avoid following the movement of a waterfall, but continually 
 recovers its position by a series of jerks. Exner has shown that 
 the sensation of motion is distinct from that of colour in the 
 human eye, where it has a special place in the lateral periphery 
 of the retinal field, completely independent of the perception 
 of objects. The faceted eyes of insects are specially adapted 
 for the detection of movement. See Auguste Forel, " The 
 Senses of Insects," 1908, p. 8. 
 
 6 
 
82 ON GARDENS 
 
 well of living water. On the other hand, 
 the reflections in still basins have a strangely 
 restful effect. They are associated, as Ruskin 
 points out (30), with the idea of quiet succession 
 and continuance ; that one day should be like 
 another, one Hfe the echo of another life, 
 being a result of quietude, part of that great 
 rhythm of harmonious change through birth 
 and death to birth again which is the heart- 
 beat of the universe. In lake or pool or river, 
 water emphasizes the prevailing note of the 
 landscape, harmonizes the picture by distri- 
 buting or echoing colours and forms, by 
 " reviving " the tints of sky, foUage and 
 flowers, and whether in movement or repose 
 it fascinates the eye which returns to it 
 again and again; it should therefore, both in 
 park and garden, be found at the focus of 
 beauty and interest. These water reflections 
 are actually more delightful than the views 
 they repeat (31), in the softness of the lights, 
 the depth, transparency and intricacy of the 
 shadows, the freshness and tenderness of the 
 colouring ; for the gloss of the water-film is 
 hke the coat of old varnish which mellows a 
 picture ; like the twilight it gives breadth, 
 connection and unity ; and the reversal of the 
 image (32) by baffling perception makes the 
 colours richer and the contrasts of hght and 
 shade more conspicuous. The effect goes even 
 further than this. We have not merely an 
 
WATER-MAGIC 83 
 
 improved presentment but an altered com- 
 position. The landscape is repeated from a 
 fresh point of view, that is to say from one as 
 much below the surface of the water as the 
 spectator is above it, and all the objects which 
 make it up are seen under different lights and 
 in different relative positions. It may thus 
 happen that the foreground, instead of being 
 merged in soft meadow or shadowy foliage, 
 is silhouetted upon the sky ; is relieved, as 
 in Turner's drawing of Nottingham (33), not 
 against the dark base of a hill but against 
 its sunlit summit. The middle distance is 
 cut out of the picture, there is a sharper grada- 
 tion of values from the nearer to the more 
 distant reflections, and the shadows are not 
 merely a lower tone but spaces of an en- 
 tirely different hue, to which the heightened 
 power of reflection gives depth and variety. 
 The blue of the sky is darkened and other 
 colours are altered or omitted. If there is 
 the least movement of the surface, vertical 
 Hnes will be lengthened and rendered more 
 emphatic, while horizontal Unes will tend to 
 disappear. 
 
 But the distant view in a water landscape 
 can never be so beautiful as a simple rendering 
 of reeds and foUage. The grandest effect of 
 aU is produced by formal canals, not too large, 
 which reflect the pavilion at the further end 
 and the lime avenues which hedge them in. 
 
84 ON GARDENS 
 
 For smaller pools, the first object must be to 
 give the water-artist something to play with — 
 richly carved balustrades as at Frascati with 
 fountain masks of bearded river-gods that 
 drop tiny runlets of crystal into the basin, or 
 mossy crevices, or the golden bloom of lichened 
 stone, or plants, if any such exist, whose leaves 
 are dark above and light below. Baby faces 
 may lean to meet the reflections or, as in 
 D'Annunzio's novel. Love and Death may 
 kiss each other. The larger or more vertical 
 the angle at which one looks down, the greater 
 is the difference between the scene and its 
 echo (34) : we may thus, by slightly sinking the 
 pool, reflect beauties of carving and surface 
 invisible from above ; phantom forms may 
 reveal themselves, or sculptured figures in the 
 water may be springing up to grasp the shadows. 
 The effect may be comphcated by strange 
 effects of light admitted through a crevice 
 between bank and balustrade. 
 
 In water the two pictures always contend, 
 reflection and transparency being in inverse 
 ratio to each other, and in some positions it 
 may be better to abandon the surface and 
 cultivate the beauties of the underworld. With 
 a fountain basin, sculpture must necessarily 
 be above the water, but in deaUng with a still 
 reservoir no such law is imposed upon us. 
 We may have a merman's pool, fringed with 
 floating lilies, where below the water-film are 
 
WATER-MAGIC 85 
 
 sea-maidens and gold-red fish and under-water 
 palaces, and that strange power the eye has 
 of clearing away reflections by the change to 
 a longer focus will enhance the effect by a 
 sudden thrill of surprise. Columns and opposing 
 mirrors may give endless vistas of pillared 
 halls, and if the pool is near the upper edge 
 of a cliff a strange light may be thrown into 
 it through an opening protected by glass. We 
 may build up a dark screen of masonry behind 
 it and illuminate it through a water passage 
 from a pool beyond, or make the still more 
 interesting experiment of " total internal re- 
 flection," (35) admitting the sun's rays in the 
 late afternoon between the stems of a great 
 hedge of beech or ilex at such an angle that 
 the returning rays will lie along or actually 
 under the surface of the water. Some of 
 these will appear to be bizarre suggestions, 
 and indeed it is Ukely enough that, except in 
 great conservatories or winter gardens, under- 
 water mirrors may produce an unquiet effect. 
 But until such experiments have been tried, 
 an opinion is of little value. There are 
 no rules in art which some great artist has 
 not shown us how to break with advantage, 
 and every new adventure is a voyage of dis- 
 covery, the outcome of which no man may 
 foresee. Nature has "thousands of exquisite 
 effects of Hght which are absolutely inexplic- 
 able," which can be beheved only while they 
 
 6* 
 
86 ON GARDENS 
 
 are seen,"" and byJgood~fortune we may reap 
 a larger harvest than we have sown. 
 
 Elsewhere the designer may prefer to play 
 with the colour of water, seeking to reproduce 
 those lovely hues of blue and green which 
 the Italians of an earlier age caught and fixed 
 in garden reservoirs, and even in small fountain 
 basins. Water absorbs the red rays of the 
 spectrum and is therefore a blue transparent 
 medium, its colour when distilled being a tint 
 of Prussian blue, as may be seen in the pure 
 ice of the glacier crevasses. All that is necessary 
 to bring out the natural beauty of the element 
 by transmitted light is, firstly, a flood of strong 
 sunshine ; secondly, to look down from above 
 as nearly vertically as possible ; thirdly, to cut 
 off reflections of the sky by trees or hedges 
 or other dark objects. Suspended particles of 
 glacier dust or chalk or lime add much to 
 the brilliance of the effect, and in a country 
 where the stone is red or yellow should give 
 a tint of green or purple or violet. In England 
 one may sometimes see blue or green pools 
 at the bottom of a deserted stone- quarry : 
 if experiment should show that good colour 
 is unattainable at a higher level under these 
 grey skies, we shall be justified in helping it 
 out by the use of coloured tiles. 
 
 On the actual technics of garden-making 
 volumes have been written, and I have no 
 wish to add to the number. But there are 
 
THE SET VIEW 87 
 
 still a few points which seem to have escaped 
 attention. It should not be forgotten that 
 there wiU always be one favourite or " set " 
 view of house and garden. This may be worked 
 up to, as an artist composes a picture, with 
 water reflections and re-entering curves, studied 
 masses of light and shade, the repetition of 
 harmonious lines and forms, and especially with 
 such a handling of scale, perspective, values and 
 gradations of tone, as will enlarge rather than 
 diminish the appearance of space and distance. 
 With a new-built house, symbolic sculpture in 
 the foreground may add the dignity of a larger 
 meaning, and to an old hall that is yet unspoilt, 
 broken fountain and weed-grown pavement 
 may give the Pathos of Time. In addition 
 to the " set " view, the route to be followed 
 by visitors who are shown over the place should 
 be considered as carefuUy as by Louis XIV. 
 at Versailles, a great part of the enjoyment 
 of a garden lying in the power to give pleasure 
 to others and to share the pleasure of one's 
 friends. 
 
 One of d'Argenville's four maxims was always 
 to make the ground look larger than it really 
 is. This principle must not be carried too far. 
 We should aim, as he teUs us in another place, 
 at that which is great and noble and studiously 
 avoid the manner that is mean and pitiful, 
 " not making httle Cabinets and Mazes, Basins 
 like Bowl-dishes and Alleys so narrow that 
 
88 ON GARDENS 
 
 two Persons can scarce go abreast in them ; 
 choosing rather to have but two or three things 
 somewhat large, than a dozen small ones which 
 are no more than very trifles." Yet un- 
 doubtedly a slight increase in the apparent 
 size of the garden and, what is at least equally 
 important, of the house, will add to the effect, 
 and in any case we must be careful not to fall 
 into the common fault of making them look 
 smaller than they are. There are many little 
 tricks of technique by which scale may be 
 given. Every architect knows how converging 
 Unes, lowered steps and balustrades, shght 
 successive reductions in the size and distance 
 apart of statues, obelisks, vases, or other 
 objects which repeat themselves, wiU lengthen 
 the perspective. A curious illusion of spacious- 
 ness is produced in some of Knyff's engravings 
 of old EngKsh gardens by a number of yew 
 obelisks placed at equal intervals from each 
 other. With a small and simple house and 
 garden in a town, quite a good effect m"ay be 
 produced by a false scale, if the owner accepts 
 it as a convention and is determined to be 
 amused by the contradiction when giant 
 figures come upon the scene. D'ArgenviUe's 
 maxim should be reversed when dealing with the 
 approach to any building of importance, and 
 the architect should follow the precedents of 
 Hardwick, Caserta, and of that villa at Pra- 
 tolino which was described as being " con- 
 
HARMONIES OF CONTRAST 89 
 
 temptible when seen from afar, but very fine 
 when you come near it " ; for as in the garden 
 appearance should be greater than reality, so 
 at the first view of the house expectation should 
 be less than reahty. 
 
 A principle which cannot be carried too far 
 is Le Notre' s law of contrast. It is not enough 
 to consider this in the first rough scheme of 
 the garden, in the general opposition of terraces 
 to a great plain or of a broad flowery level to 
 a landscape of rolling hiUs ; we must apply it 
 also at the boundary, where art and nature 
 meet, and in every corner of the grounds, 
 grouping together sunshine and shadow, grove 
 and bowling-green, high and low, rich and 
 simple, line and curve. In order to heighten 
 the values of surfaces by contrast, every country 
 house should have its paved court, its parterres 
 of turf and gravel. The delicious softness of 
 grass gives at the first footstep a release from 
 care, ^hich should be proffered close to the 
 house, and if possible at a centre of beauty. 
 Parterres of box and gravel have, independent 
 of contrast, a peculiar dignity and beauty ; it 
 is not true, though often stated by English 
 designers, that the Itahans of the Renaissance 
 would have preferred to use grass had the 
 climate allowed. The colour and smooth sur- 
 face of lemon-pots make a pleasant harmony 
 with a box parterre, as stone vases and paving 
 with a carpet of turf ; indeed, in a green garden 
 
90 ON GARDENS 
 
 the walks should always be paved, the thin 
 edge of grass upon gravel having a mean effect. 
 In a long Une of flower beds, rectangles should 
 alternate with circles, tangled thickets of un- 
 related flowers with masses of the same flower 
 in varied colours, so that there may be the 
 added charm of unity in diversity. The best 
 method of judging minor architectural features, 
 such as piers and stairways, is to consider 
 whether they are bold enough and quiet enough 
 to take their place in a picture. 
 
IV 
 
 To make a great garden, one must have a great 
 idea or a great opportunity ; a cypress cause- 
 way leading to a giant's castle, or a fountain 
 cave where a ceaseless iris plays on a river 
 falling through the roof, or a deep clear pool 
 with an under-world fantasy of dragon-guarded 
 treasure caves lit by unearthly light, or a 
 mighty palace quadrangle lined with hanging 
 gardens of arcaded terraces, or a great galleon 
 in a lake whose decks are dropping with jasmine 
 and myrtle, or a precipitous ravine with double 
 bridges and a terrace on either hand. But it 
 is possible to introduce a touch of imaginative 
 beauty into almost any garden by finding the 
 most perfect form for one of its features, or by 
 giving expression to the soul of some particular 
 flower or tree, as with the Virginian vine on the 
 trellis arcades at Schwetzingen and the cypress 
 in the Giusti avenue at Verona. 
 
 So, if it is to be a rose-garden, do not choose 
 these stunted, unnatural, earth-loving strains, 
 which have nothing of vigour and wildness in 
 them, nor banish other flowers which may do 
 
 91 
 
92 ON GARDENS 
 
 homage to the beauty of a rose as courtiers to 
 a queen. Let dimbing roses drop in a veil 
 from the terrace and smother with flower- 
 spangled embroidery the garden walls, run 
 riot over vaulted arcades, clamber up lofty 
 obeUsks of leaf-tangled trellis, twine themselves 
 round the piUars of a rose-roofed temple, where 
 little avalanches of sweetness shall rustle down 
 at a touch and the dusty gold of the sunshine 
 shall mingle with the summer snow of the 
 flying petals. Let them leap in a great bow or 
 fall in a creamy cataract to a foaming pool of 
 flowers. In the midst of the garden set a 
 statue of Venus with a great bloom trained to 
 her hand, or of Flora, her cornucopia over- 
 flowing with white rosettes, or a tiny basin 
 where leaden amorini seated upon the margin 
 are fishing with trailing buds. If the place be 
 away from the house and surrounded by forest 
 trees, let there be a rose balloon weighed down 
 by struggling cupids, or the hollow ribs and 
 bellying curves of an old-world ship with ruddy 
 sail and cordage flecked with ivory blossom, 
 or one of those rose-castles which the French 
 romance gave to the garden for a mimic siege 
 in May, low towers of carpenter's work with 
 flanking turrets and iron-studded pastern. Such 
 a Chateau d' Amour is represented on many a 
 mediaeval casket and mirror-case. Ponderous 
 mangonels are bombarding the fortress with 
 monstrous blossoms, while from the battle- 
 
SCULPTURE 93 
 
 ments fair ladies hurl down roses still heavy 
 with morning dew full in the faces of the 
 attacking knights (36). 
 
 Gardens consecrated to the worship of some 
 particular flower have been in favour since 
 the Ancient Sages devoted their old age to the 
 culture of chrysanthemum or peony, but who 
 has yet worked out the utmost beauty of blue 
 iris or silver-chaliced water-lily, of sweet pea 
 or pansy, or, sacred to the Queen of Heaven, 
 the " flower and plant of light " ? Who has 
 realized to the full the glory of vine, or 
 clematis, or honeysuckle, wistaria, or bougan- 
 viUea ? If it be sculpture that you seek, try 
 the effect of a fountain court of amorini, where 
 baby loves are chmbing the obelisks and the 
 flower-vases, playing and splashing each other 
 upon the water-edge, swimming out to a marble 
 Nef whose mast and sail and homing bows are 
 festooned with clambering cupids. Turn into 
 marble Watteau's dream, " L'Embarquement 
 pour rile de Cyth^re" or Fragonard's "Fontaine 
 d' Amour." Let there be a children's corner, the 
 Good Shepherd of the Catacombs with a lamb 
 upon His shoulder standing amongst the little 
 beds, or a Garden of the Happy Hours, where 
 Time by the sun-dial is fast asleep, his hands 
 and feet fettered with rose-wreaths, while on 
 the steps below him the children are weaving 
 their flower-garlands, wrestling, reading, sing- 
 ing, plajdng at war and art and marriage. 
 
94 ON GARDENS 
 
 If it be colour that you desire, let the view from 
 the low parlour window be a flash of lavender- 
 blue, centred with gold, remembering that 
 wild Nature's lovehest effects are in this key of 
 colour, as witness the hyacinths that repeat the 
 sky, the purple tide of the heather, the Alpine 
 anemones, the dark blue gentians of the Jura 
 pastures ; if a wall garden, throw round it a grey 
 ring of castle walls, for in art it is only appear- 
 ances that matter, and forgery is not a crime 
 unless it fails to deceive.^ Of historic motives 
 for laying out there can never be a lack. The 
 fruit trees and vine-covered trellises that tem- 
 pered the sunshine in the late Roman gardens, 
 the pergolas and vaulted paviUons of the 
 Normans in Sicily, the green tunnels of the 
 fourteenth century, the stately arched hedges 
 of Bacon's essay, are well suited to any country 
 where the summer heat is oppressive. How 
 interesting to re-constitute a forgotten type, 
 the garden of Queen Ultrogoth, the flower- 
 orchard of the Dark Ages, the Paradise of 
 William the Bad, the Gothic pleasaunce of 
 Crescentius, of the "Roman de la Rose," of 
 Chaucer, of the " King's Quair ! " In every land 
 there are countless old houses still disfigured 
 by the bare lawn and tortuous ways of the 
 landscape gardener, and no one will have lived 
 
 ^ Near Pallanza on Lake Maggiore there is a strangely- 
 successful castle ruin built to protect a private garden from 
 being overlooked from the windows of an hotel near by. 
 
MOTIVES OF DESIGN 95 
 
 in vain who is able to restore to one pf them the 
 melodious beauty of which Pope and Rousseau 
 robbed it. 
 
 But we are not forced to confine ourselves 
 to imaginative reproductions of the past. In- 
 vention was not exhausted in the eighteenth 
 century when design went out of fashion. I 
 know no reason why we should not have subtly 
 curving terrace fronts and courts that sweep 
 outward like the mouth of a trumpet to enlarge 
 the view, and indeed but for the intrusion of 
 the unhallowed Giardino Inglese, this might 
 have been the natural development of the 
 Rococo garden. How many flowery realms 
 there are yet to conquer ! Who has yet sought 
 the summer coolness of a water labyrinth with 
 rose-bordered canals, where a great pool serves 
 for a lawn in front of the house and boats may 
 pass among the fruit trees and the flowers ; 
 or the quaintness of a garden of autumn fruit, 
 where purple grapes hang in jewelled clusters 
 upon the wall, dwarf pears and fairy apples 
 are touched with quivering gold ; where gourds 
 and pumpkins like strange reptiles have crept 
 out of the flower-beds to sun themselves upon 
 the pavers, some great as the wheels of 
 Cinderella's coach, some shaped by nature as 
 punch-bowls or urns or bottles or balloons 
 or writhing serpents, some moulded for sport 
 into dragons' heads and laughing masks and 
 monstrous baroque faces ? Who has yet 
 
96 ON GARDENS 
 
 realized the poetry, the forlorn and elfish 
 beauty of a deserted garden ? Who has worked 
 out the possibilities of a sea-shore demesne, or of 
 an amphitheatre in a quarried cliff, or — except 
 at Syracuse — of flowery paths that wind their 
 way across stony abysses ? Who has made 
 for himself the knots and pergolas of a roof 
 terrace where, as in Seneca's day, orchards may 
 be planted upon the highest towers and whole 
 forests may shake upon the tops and turrets 
 of the house ? The false perspective which 
 Nero introduced about his Golden House, giving 
 across the lawns and lakes prospects of far-off 
 cities, might, if the limitations be frankly 
 accepted, be developed into a minor art, as 
 indeed it is in Japan. Flattened curves and 
 contrasts of foliage are often used to give the 
 illusion of distance, and the method can be 
 carried further, for with flowering shrubs one 
 may represent a distant waterfall, or turn a 
 commonplace hill, like that at Scarborough, 
 into a snow-capped mountain. 
 
 But whatever the garden is to be, whether 
 its roses are to clamber up the eaves of 
 a cottage or the towers of a palace, this at 
 least is necessary, that it should be made with 
 a care for the future and a conviction of the 
 importance of the task. According to Bacon, 
 gardens are for refreshment ; not for pleasure 
 alone, nor even for happiness, but for the 
 renewing rest that makes labour more fruitful. 
 
MORAL INFLUENCE OF GARDENS 97 
 
 the unbending of a bow that it may shoot the 
 stronger. In the ancient world it was ever 
 the greatest of the emperors and the wisest 
 of the philosophers that sought peace and 
 rest in a garden. By the oUve groves and 
 flower-bordered canals of the Academia Plato 
 discussed with his followers the supremacy 
 of reason, the identity of truth and goodness. 
 Among the roses and myrtles and covered 
 walks of the Lyceum Aristotle taught that 
 perfect happiness is to be found in contem- 
 plation, in the divine intuitions of reason. 
 Theophrastus left to his pupils the shady 
 theatre of their studies, and amidst the fruit 
 and flowers Epicurus pondered how by wise 
 conduct to attain happiness. In the garden 
 of the Bamboo-Grove Buddha taught the 
 conquest of self, and in the Garden of Sorrows 
 a greater teacher was found, for we know 
 that Jesus ofttimes resorted thither with His 
 disciples. The cloistered paradises of Sicily 
 and of the Arabs may have been made for 
 fairer, frailer flowers, but the rose-tangled 
 orchards of the Middle Age and the great gardens 
 of the Renaissance did not serve for pleasure 
 alone. In the romances we find the company 
 playing chess in the apple-garden, singing, 
 weaving garlands, dancing the carol, looking 
 on at the play of jugglers, tumblers and dancing- 
 girls, but here also they hsten to the lay of 
 the troubadour, and here part of the business 
 
 7 
 
98 ON GARDENS 
 
 of government is carried on. In the "Chanson 
 de Roland/' Charlemagne gives audience in a 
 verger to the ambassadors of the Pagan King 
 of Spain, seated on a golden chair of state 
 beside a bush of eglantine under the shadow of 
 a pine tree, and in " Garin le Loherain," Count 
 Fremont, one of the great barons, receives 
 a messenger sitting in a garden surrounded 
 by his friends. Some of the great pleasure- 
 grounds of the Renaissance were ever crowded 
 with a great retinue of priests and lawyers, 
 architects and painters, doctors and men of 
 letters, to whom they offered change and rest 
 and freedom. Others were the homes of a 
 court, where laws were considered, finance 
 was regulated, envoys were received ; where 
 in one arbour the Poet Laureate might be 
 paying his addresses to the Muse, in another 
 the Treasurer be grappling with his budget, 
 while by the fountain under the shadow of 
 the cypresses the Prince and his companions 
 were discussing the doctrines of Plato and the 
 greatness of the ancient world. Many of the 
 letters of Rene d'Anjou are dated from 
 the garden at Aix, and a century later we 
 find Queen Elizabeth giving audience in her 
 garden at Hampton and one of her courtiers 
 attesting a charter in his viridarium at Edzell. 
 The garden, like beauty in landscape, is 
 inimical to all evil passions (37) : it stands for 
 efficiency, for patience in labour, for strength 
 
GARDENS AND IMAGINATION 99 
 
 in adversity, for the power to forgive. Perhaps 
 at the last, in contemplation of the recurring 
 miracle of spring and of that eternal stream 
 of life which is ever flowing before our eyes, 
 we may find that it stands for something 
 more — one of the three things the Greek 
 philosopher thought it lawful to pray for, 
 hope to the dying ; for along the thread of 
 time and consciousness the individual is never 
 severed from the race ; he is but a leaf on a 
 tree, a blossom on a flowering plant ; to the 
 ocean of Ufe he goes, and from the ocean he 
 may return again. Gardens have coloured 
 every dream of future Ufe, every hope of 
 happiness in this, and he who can make them 
 more beautiful has helped to exalt the sentiment 
 of religion, poetry and love. The older de- 
 scriptions of Paradise are simple renderings 
 of the pleasure-grounds of the Persians and 
 the flower-orchards of the Dark Ages, imagina- 
 tion being able to picture to itself things more 
 perfect than the eye ever saw, but not things 
 diverse in kind (38). The mind cannot antici- 
 pate an unknown sensation ; the deaf mute 
 cannot form an idea of sound, nor the man who 
 is bUnd from birfh have a mental vision. Every 
 impression, whatever its elements may be, is 
 an indivisible whole, differing from its parts 
 and even from the sum of them as a chord 
 in music from the notes of which it is composed, 
 or a new flower from the plants that gave it 
 
lOo ON GARDENS 
 
 birth (39), and it is thus always in the power 
 of the artist to give us a fresh creation, some- 
 thing different in kind, as different as were 
 the fountain courts of the Renaissance from 
 the gardens of the Arabs, or the terraces of 
 Helmsley from the alleys of Versailles. 
 
 St. Carlo's unjust judgment on Cardinal 
 Gambara — that the revenues laid out upon 
 his villa would have been better employed 
 in good works— has even now its defenders, 
 and we have yet with us the " practical man " 
 who, visiting the dream-gardens of Italy, can 
 see nothing in the cypresses but bundles of 
 faggots, in the flower-beds but baskets of 
 vegetables, in the statues and fountains but 
 heaps of road-metal, and goes away sorrowful 
 at heart over the selfishness of these aristocrats, 
 who waste on pride and luxury what might 
 have been given to the poor. Yet in truth 
 such a garden as that of Lante is a world- 
 possession, and the builder of it like a great 
 poet who has influenced the Hfe of thousands, 
 putting them in touch with the greatness of 
 the past, lifting their thoughts and aspirations 
 to a higher level, revealing to them the light 
 of their own soul, opening their eyes to the 
 beauty of the world. Architecture, the most 
 unselfish of arts, belong^ to the passer-by, 
 and every old house and garden in \vhich the 
 ideal has been sought is a gift to the nation, 
 to be enjoyed by future generations who 
 
ART THAT ENRICHES LIFE loi 
 
 will learn from it more of history and art 
 and philosophy than may be found in books. 
 Thus the garden-maker is striving not for 
 himself alone but for those who are to come 
 after, for the unborn children who shall play 
 on the flowery lawns and chase each other 
 through the alleys, filling their laps with 
 treasure of never-fading roses, weaving amidst 
 the flowers and the sunshine dream-garlands 
 of golden years. They too will share the 
 joys and sorrows of the garden, will learn to 
 love even the humblest tribes of its inhabitants : 
 the prodigal weeds that carry the banners of 
 spring in procession upon the cornices, and 
 the dwarf trees, dead to the world, that have 
 rooted themselves Hke anchorites in the crevices ; 
 the tinted Hchen which feed on pure air and 
 sunshine and outlast the stubborn oaks, and 
 the lowly mosses which drink in the dewdrops 
 and the blue shadows of the mighty trees ; 
 the sweet-sighing herbs of the twilight ; and 
 the pale stars of earth which, stirred from their 
 slumbers when night is dropping dew into 
 the mouths of the thirsty flowers, call the 
 outcast moths to a honeyed banquet. They 
 too will know bare winter's hidden hoard, 
 when the earth under their feet is full of 
 dreams^dim memories of misty morris arid 
 dewy eves, of the slumbrous warmth of the 
 golden sunshine, the soft caresses of the life- 
 giving breezes, the nuptial kisses of the bees. 
 
102 ON GARDENS 
 
 They too will feel the rhythmic breath of 
 wakening life froni the countless milhons of 
 beings in earth and air and dewdrop and 
 riviilet, with the rising murmur of insect delight, 
 the scent of the sun-kissed grasses — all the 
 mystery and music, the riot and rapture of 
 the spring, and the passion of the flaming 
 roses, and that strange thrill of autumn sadness 
 when the flowers that have mingled their 
 perfumes through the summer are breathing 
 out to each other the grief of a last farewell. 
 
 It is not given to every man, when his hfe's 
 work is over, to grow old in a garden he has 
 made, to lose in the ocean roll of the seasons 
 little eddies of pain and sickness and weariness, 
 to watch year after year green surging tides of 
 spring and summer break at his feet in a foam 
 of woodland flowers, and the garden like a 
 faithful retainer growing grey in its master's 
 service. But for him who may live to see it, 
 there shall be a wilder beauty than any he 
 has planned. Nature, hke a shy wood-nymph, 
 shall steal softly back on summer nights to 
 the silent domain, shading with tenderest 
 pencUlings of brown and grey the ripened 
 stone, scattering wood-violets in the grassy 
 alleys and wreathing in vine and ivy the 
 trellised arbour, painting with cloudy crusts 
 of crumbly gold the long balustrades, inlaying 
 the cornices with lines of emerald moss, 
 planting Uttle ferns within the fountain basin 
 
OLD-AGE IN THE GARDEN 103 
 
 and tiny patches of green velvet upon the 
 Sea-God's shoulder. As the years pass by 
 and no rude hand di,sturbs the traces of her 
 presence, Nature becomes more daring. Flower- 
 spangled tapestries of woven tendrils faU from 
 the terrace, strange fleecy mottlings of silver- 
 grey and saffron and orange and greeny-gold 
 make the wall a medley more beautiful than 
 broidered hangings or than painted pictures, 
 the niches are curtained with creepers, the 
 pool is choked with water-plants, blossoming 
 weeds are in every crevice, and with pendent 
 crystals the roof of the grotto is fretted into 
 an Arab vavdt. Autumn has come at last, 
 and the harvest is being gathered in. Flying 
 shafts of silvery splendour fall upon the fountain, 
 and aU the house is dark, save for the strange 
 light that is burning yet in the chamber window. 
 Softly the Triton mourns, as if sobbing below 
 his breath, alone in the moon-enchanted fairy- 
 land of a deserted garden. 
 
REFERENCES IN THE TEXT 
 
 (i) ." A New Voyage to Italy," ii. 65, 291. 
 
 (2) G. S. HiUard, " Six Months in Italy," 1853. 
 
 (3) " Modern Painters," 1898, v. 218 (part ix. chap. i. 
 par. iv.) 
 
 ' (4) Forel, " The Senses of Insects," 1908, 3, 122, 196 ; 
 Lubbock, " The Senses of Animals," 1889, 191-3. 
 
 (5) W. James, " Principles of Psychology," 1891, ii. 298. 
 
 (6) " Modern Painters," 1898, iii. 140-1 (part iv. chap. x. 
 pars. 8, 9), 298-301 (part iv. chap. xvii. pars. 3-7). 
 
 (7} Ferrier, " The Functions of the Brain," 1876, 257-9. 
 
 (8) Spencer, " Principles of Psychology," 1870, i. 178, 
 477. 485, 562, 565-6 (pars. 71, 211, 214, 245, 246) ; James, 
 " Principles of Psychology," 1891, i. 562. 
 
 (9) " Modem Painters," 1898, iii. 297-9 (i"- xvii. pars. 
 2, 3, 4) ; James, " Psychology," i. 558-9, 254-5. 
 
 (10) James, " Psychology," i. 479 noU. 
 
 (11) Spencer, "Psychology," i. 485, 493-4. 57^ (pars. 
 214, 216, 247). 
 
 (12) Spencer, " Psychology," 1870, i. 191, 258 (pars. 76, 
 116). 
 
 (13) Spencer, i. 599-601, ii. 593-4 (pars. 261, 519). 
 
 (14) James, ii. 295. 
 
 (15) Spencer, "Psychology," 1870, i. 466, 491, 570 j 
 ii.,580 (pars. 208, 216, 247, 514). 
 
 (16) James, " Psychology," ii. 428. 
 
 (17) Spencer, " Psychology," 1870, i. 485 (par. 214). 
 
 (18) " Modern Painters," ii. 45-7 (part iii. sec. i. chap. v. 
 pars. 6-8). 
 
 105 
 
io6 REFERENCES IN THE TEXT 
 
 (ig) " Modern Painters," 1897, i. xl. 
 
 (20) " Modem Painters," 1898, iii. 310 (part iv. chap, 
 xvii. par. 22). 
 
 (21) "Modern Painters," 1897, ii. 34 (part iii. sec. i. 
 chap. iv. par. 4). 
 
 (22) James, i. 575. 
 
 (23) James, ij. 316 ; Grant Allen, " Physiological /Es- 
 thetics," 1877, pp. 175-80. 
 
 (24) Ruskin, " Seven I^amps of Architecture," chap. v. 
 
 (25) Spencer, " Psychology," par. 539. 
 
 (26) See Sir Joshua Reynolds' foijrteenth Discourse. 
 
 (27) Raymond, " Essentials of ^Esthetics," 1907, 153-4 > 
 Ruskin, " Modern Painters," 1898, iii. 141-8 (p9.rt iv. 
 chap. X. pars. 9-18) ; W. James, " Psychology," 1891, ii. 
 124. 
 
 (28) Bain, " Rhetoric," 1892, ii. 29, 53, 206. 
 
 (29) Ruskin, " Stones of Venice," vol. iii. chap. i. par. 7. 
 
 (30) " Turner's Harbours of England," 1856 ; note on 
 the drawing of Scarborough. 
 
 (31) " Modern Painters," 1897, i. 345-55 (part ii. sect. v. 
 chap. i. pars. i-io). 
 
 (32) James, " Principles of Psychology," ii. 81. 
 
 (33) "Modem Painters," 190Q, i. 380 (part ii. sec. v. 
 chap. iii. par. 8). 
 
 (34) Sir Montagu Pollock, " Light and Water." 
 
 (35) Sir Montagu PoUock, " Light and Water," 1903, 
 61 note. 
 
 (36) J. Westwood, " Description of the Fictile Ivories of 
 S. K. Museum," 1883, pp. 297, 299, 300, 309. 
 
 (37) Ruskin, " Modern Painters," iii. 308, 312 (part iv. 
 chap. xvii. pars. 18, 26-30). 
 
 (38) Spencer, '" Psychology," par. 187 ; James, " Psy- 
 chology," ii. 44 ; Ruskin, " Modern Painters," iii. ii. ii. lo 
 and iv. iii. 23. 
 
 (39) James, " Psychology," i. 488, ii. 2 noie, 30, 45, 270 ; 
 Spencer, " Psychology," par. 211. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbondi garden, the, 30 
 Addison^ 4, 5 
 Alassio^ 30 
 Albanp, 33, 44 
 Alberti, 10 
 Albertini, Villa, 30 
 Albissola, 33 
 
 Aldobrandini, Villa, 18, 31, 32 
 Alison, 56, 61 
 Allen, Grant, 59 
 Argenville, d', 87, 88 
 Arsen, Villa, 33 
 
 Bacon's essay on Gardens, i, 
 
 2, 71. 72, 74. 94. 96 
 Bagnaia, 13, 45 
 Battaglia, 33 
 Bergamo, 24, 25 
 Bernardini, Villa, 21, 22, 34 
 Blenheim, 30 
 Blickling, 44 
 Boboli, 73 
 Bogliaco, 21 
 Bologna, John of, 18 
 Bonin, Palazzo, 23 
 Borghese, Villa, 21, 22, 29, 73 
 Bramante, 10 
 Brescia, 23, 26, 27, 74 
 
 Cadenabbia, 21 
 
 Campagna, 37, 46 
 Canephorae, 17 
 Canossa, Palace, 24 
 Capability Brown, jo, 68 
 Caprarola, 17 
 Capua, 79 
 Caxlotti, Villa, 21 
 Caserta, 73, 88 ' 
 
 Castelazzo, 22, 33 
 CasteUo, 21 
 Castello d'Urio, 21 
 Castelnuovo Institute, 22 
 Chinese gardens, 8, 9 
 Cicogna garden, the, 21, 22 
 CoUodi, 22 
 
 Colonna garden, the, 22, 73 
 Como, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31 
 Constantine, Baths of, 22 
 Controni-Pini, Palazzo, 23 
 Costa, Palazzo, 26 
 Cremona, 26 
 CriveUi, Villa, 33 
 
 Drajrton, 33 
 
 Durazzo Pallavicini, Palazzo, 
 
 23 
 Dutch gardens, 2 
 
 Edzell, 98 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 98 
 
 107 
 
io8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 English gardens, 5 
 
 Este, Villa d', 10, 11, 12, 13, 
 
 19, 33. 73. 74 
 Evelyn, 30 
 
 Falconetto, 23 
 Fenarola, 74 
 Ferrara, Castle of, 22 
 Ferrasan, Marchese, 29 
 Fiori, Via dei, 23 
 Florence, 18, 21, 22, 32, 79 
 Forel, 55, 81 
 Frascati, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 
 
 22, 29, 31, 32, 35, 44 
 Fremont, Count, 98 
 
 Gambara, Cardinal, 100 
 Gamberaia, Villa, 21, 32, 4.5 
 Gambetta, Cardinal, 14 
 Garda, Lake, 21 
 Garden, beauty of, 52-67; 
 sculpture in, 74-80; water 
 in, 28-9, 81-6 
 Garden-making, secrets of 
 success in, 38, 44-6, 68-73 ; 
 motives, 29-32, 93-6 ; tech- 
 nics, 86-90 
 Garzoni, Villa, 79 
 Genoa, 22, 23, 32 
 Giovio, Palazzo, 23 
 Giulio, Villa di Papa, 3 1 
 Giusti garden, 15, 16, 17, 91 
 Giustiniani, Palazzo, 23 
 Gori, ViUa, 22 
 Guinigi, 23 
 
 Hamerton, 40, 42 
 Hampton Court, 33, Ti, 98 
 Hardwick, 88 
 Hegel, 8 
 
 Helmsley, 73, 100 
 Herbert, 63 
 Herrick, 63 
 Hogarth, 3 
 
 Imperiale Villa, 22, 32 
 Insects, object- world of, 54 
 Inverigo, 33 
 Isola Bella, 18, 73 
 Isolotto, 18, 19 
 
 Italian Renaissance gardens, 
 10, II, 27, 43, 97, 98, 100 • 
 
 James, W., 48, 81 
 John XXI., Pope, 31 
 Jonson, 63 
 
 Keats, John, 63 
 
 Kent, 10 
 
 KnyflE's engravings, 88 
 
 Landscape Annual, 10 
 
 Lante, Duke of, 13, 14, 15, 100 
 
 Lecco, 30 
 
 Le Notre, 4, 89 
 
 Levens, "}}, 
 
 Loano, 29 
 
 Longhi, 3 
 
 Louis XIV., 5, 87 
 
 Lucca, 21, 22, 23, 34, 79 
 
 Luxembourg, 5 
 
 Maeterlinck, 59 
 Mansi, Villa, 22 
 Mantua, 17, 22 
 Medici, Villa, 30, 33 
 Melbourne, 73 
 Michael Angelo, 10, 55 
 Michele, San, 16 
 
INDEX 
 
 109 
 
 Michelozzo, lo 
 
 Milan, 22 
 
 Milton, 63 
 
 Misson, 10 
 
 Mondragone, Villa, 22, 35, 36, 
 
 37. 43 
 Montacute, 33 
 Montaigne, 4 
 Monte Porzio, 35 
 Montmorency, 5 
 Morettl, Via, 23 
 Muti, ViUa, 32 
 
 Oceamis, statue of, 18 
 
 Padua, 23 
 
 Palermo, 22 ; Botanic 
 
 Gardens at, 33 
 Pallavicini, VUla, 30 
 PamphUi, Villa, 30 
 Pegli, 30 
 Perugino, 41 
 Piacenza, 26 
 Pitti Palace, 30 
 Plato, 17, 97, 98 
 Pfiniana, Villa, 22, 31 
 Pratolino, 10, 30, 31 
 
 Quirini Palace, 24 
 
 Raimondi, Palazzo, 26 
 Raphael, 10 
 Ravello, 79 
 Reale, Villa, 22 
 Riva, 30 
 Rome, 22, 32, 33 
 Roses, 91-3 
 
 Rousseau, 5 
 Ruskin, 9, 61, 73,' 82 
 
 St. Carlo, 100 
 Savona, 29, 30, 33 
 Schwetzingen, 91 
 Senese, Villa, 22 
 Sergardi, Villa, 22 
 Shakespeare, 49, 63 
 Shelley, 63 
 Siena, 22 
 Soncino, Via, 23 
 Spencer, 56, 58, 63, 66, 74 
 
 Tacitus, 41 
 
 Temple, Sir William, essay 
 
 on Gardens, 17, 74 
 Tivoli, 10, 44 
 Torlonia, Villa, 19, 20 
 Triest, Via, 23 
 
 Ultrogoth, Queen, 94 
 
 Val San Zibio, 33 
 Valmarana garden, 79 
 Varese, 21, 22 ; Grand Hotel, 
 
 33 
 Vatican garden, the, 30, 73 
 Vaughan, 63 
 Verona, 15, 23, 91 
 Versailles, 2, 4, 10, 87, 100 
 Vicenza, 23, 24, 79 
 Vignola, 10 
 Viterbo, 13, 31 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 10 
 Watteau, 3, 5, 93 
 Wordsworth, WOliam, 41 
 
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