Garden Design and Architects' Gardens / Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them 'harmonise' with architecture is barbarous, needless, and inartistic

Buildings in Relation to the Garden

Longleat Longleat. Type of nobler English country seat with old house and picturesque planting

The place of formal gardening is clear for ever. The architect can help the gardener much by building a beautiful house! That is his work. The true architect, it seems to me, would seek to go no farther. The better the real work of the architect is done, the better for the garden and landscape. If there are any difficulties of level about the house beautiful, they should be dealt with by the architect, and the better his work and the necessary terracing, if any, are done, the pleasanter the work of the landscape or other gardener who has to follow him should be.

Old Place, Lindfield Old Place, Lindfield. Picturesque garden of old English house, admitting of charming variety in its vegetation

That a garden is made for plants is what most people who care for gardens suppose. If a garden has any use, it is to treasure for us beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees. In these days—when our ways of building are the laughing-stock of all who care for beautiful buildings—there is plenty for the architect to do without spoiling our gardens! Most of the houses built in our time are so bad, that even the best gardening could hardly save them from contempt. Our garden flora is now so large, that a life's work is almost necessary to know it. How is a man to make gardens wisely if he does not know what has to be grown in them? I do not mean that we are to exclude other men than the landscape gardener proper from the garden. We want all the help we can get from those whose tastes and training enable them to help us—the landscape painter best of all, if he cares for gardens and trees—the country gentleman, or any keen student and lover of Nature. The landscape gardener of the present day is not always what we admire, his work often looking more like that of an engineer. His gardening near the house is usually a repetition of the decorative work of the house, of which I hope many artistic people are already tired. And as I think people will eventually see the evil and the wastefulness of this "decorative" stuff, and spend their money on really beautiful and artistic things, so I think the same often-repeated "knots" and frivolous patterns must leave the artistic garden, and simpler and dignified forms take their place.

To endeavour to apply any one preconceived plan or general idea to every site is folly, and the source of many blunders. The authors are not blind to the absurdities of the architectural gardeners, and say, on page 232:—

Rows of statues were introduced from the French, costly architecture superseded the simple terrace, intricate parterres were laid out from gardeners' pattern books, and meanwhile the flowers were forgotten. It was well that all this pomp should be swept away. We do not want this extravagant statuary, these absurdities in clipped work, this aggressive prodigality. But though one would admit that in its decay the formal garden became unmanageable and absurd, the abuse is no argument against the use.

Certainly not where the place calls for it, and all absolutely necessary stone-work about a house should be controlled by the architect; beyond that, nothing. To let him lay out our home landscapes again with lines of trees, as shown in the old Dutch books, and with no regard to landscape design and to the relations of the garden to the surrounding country, would be the greatest evil that could come to the beautiful home landscapes of Britain.

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