THE FORMAL GARDEN:

ITS REVIVAL AND ITS RECENT LITERATURE

FRANK MILES DAY, Philadelphia.

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That the controversy between the formal and the natural schools in gardening has been in progress these two hundred years is news to no one. The conflict has lasted to our own day and the rumble of the latest engagement is still in our ears. whom the mead of victory is given depends on the temperament and inclination of the arbiter. But with whichever party we take our stand, or if, with the philosophic few, we are able to discern something of truth on each side, we cannot fail to see that the very eagerness of the dispute has stimulated that interest in gardens which exists wherever the human race has escaped from the grip of the purely material. For two or three thousand years an orderly arrangement in the garden, straight lines and well-marked boundaries, seemed obviously right. But in the art of gardens, as in all other arts, there come times of decadence when false taste takes the place of true, when follies are exalted, and the judicious have cause for grief. So it was, at least in England, in the seventeenth century. The revolt against ridiculous excesses in clipped box and yew and against the puerilities of a parterre made of colored earths and broken minerals,—a revolt started as a protest against tasteless absurdities,―gained such an impetus that in the end it resulted in a new school of gardening, the principles of which were fundamentally at variance with those of the older method. How rapid and complete was this

Copyright, 1902, by Frederick A. Richardson.

change of thought we may gather from the fact that in 1728 Batty Langly, a staunch adherent of the new method, was able to ask, in full hope of a negative answer from every reader, “Is there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular garden?" For two hundred years, although Kent, Capability Brown, and their successors have had it almost all their own way, the formal manner in England has never been quite dead. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century a number of large gardens were laid out in the Anglicized Italian manner, a manner which lent itself with fatal facility to the tastelessness of the "bedding out" system. Now and then throughout the century something has been done worthily in the old way, as at Penshurst, Blicking, or Montacute, but it is only within the last twenty years that there has been in England a definite, even though not very general, revival of the formal method.

In America the case is different. Although many of the earlier colonists came here at a time when the ideas of the landscape school were making great headway in England, the gardens about their new homes were in almost all cases formal. Stately houses of the eighteenth century from Virginia to Massachusetts had their surroundings laid out in harmony with their architectural lines. The abundant remains of these old gardens, possessed as they are of a quiet charm all their own, bear witness to the fact that our ancestors not only loved their gardens, but took a most intelligent interest in them.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the ideas of the landscape school made great headway in America, with the result that before the middle of the century the formal manner was practically dead. Valuable as has been the landscape method to us in the laying out of our many public parks, it is greatly to be regretted that there came a time when even the immediate surroundings of houses were designed in utter disregard of what had for ages seemed fundamental principles. Not even a path was permitted to run in a straight line. So persistent are some of the errors of the system that even to the present time the destruction of the reasonable boundaries of

individual ownership goes on, and by a treatment which ignores them we carry on a pretense that deprives the home of that privacy in its immediate surroundings to which it is justly entitled. Hard as it is to make headway against what the public has long been taught to consider the only right method, much has been done of late years. A great body of men among us has been trained as architects. They have traveled in Europe, studying their They have learned that a well-designed building is doubly beautiful in well-designed surroundings, and they have set to work to design such surroundings for their buildings. Examples spring up on every hand, from the simple terraces that now so often form the setting of a surburban house, to the fully developed architectural treatment such as that of the Foster garden at Lenox.

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Interest in gardening being greatly quickened, publishers have not been slow to show that they realize the fact. It may therefore be well to cast a glance over some of the more important books on the subject which have of late years made their appear

ance.

Of those who praise the formal garden, few command the magic words of Sedding. His "Garden-craft" is a realm of fancy. No page of it is without music and inspiration. An artist to his finger tips, blending originality and conservatism in all his work, Sedding was by nature and experience well-fitted to urge a study of the older modes of gardening as a help in bettering the designs of our own day. That such a gentle book, so well-attuned to nature and to art, should have aroused the indignation of the landscapists is an evidence of the persistent bitterness of the old contention between the schools. Yet it did arouse them, even in spite of the fact that Sedding saw much good in the natural method, and ended his book with a chapter "in praise

(1) John D. Sedding, Garden-craft, Old and New. illustrations by the author. 6" x 9". First edition, 1890. 1895. London: Kegan Paul; French, Trubner & Co. 1902. London and New York: John Lane.

215 PP. Nine Second edition,

New edition,

of both," finding that it was "the English taste for landscape which gives the English garden its distinction." Sedding is at his best when he writes on the theory of a garden, why it is made, what is its right treatment, what should be its relation to the house. Plain enough questions, to be sure. But he answers them with such a charm of style, with such a calling up of exquisite images that one scarcely knows whether he is reading a treatise on gardens or a work of imagination all compact.

In Blomfield's "The Formal Garden in England," which appeared a couple of years after Sedding's book, there was far more to arouse the ire of the opponents of the architectural method. It is, in effect, a brief history of gardening in England, but from the point of view of one who can see little good in the so-called natural method and every excellence in the formal. He speaks his mind with the utmost plainness, and in a way not in the least calculated to allay the irritation which Sedding's book had caused. He gives an admirably clear account of the surroundings of an old English house. What purpose the fore-court served and how long its use lasted, what was the base-court and where it was placed, the use of terraces, the arrangement of walks,-all these were fully treated, and the various divisions of the garden, the parterres, bowling greens, and fish ponds, are described. Of the minor structures, such as tool houses, gateways, bridges, and flights of steps usually found in old-fashioned gardens, many examples are given. For one who wishes to know what manner of garden it was that pleased our English ancestors from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, no better book can be found.

After the appearance of "The Formal Garden," but a few months elapsed until Mr. W. Robinson, the champion of the landscape method, published his " Garden Design and Architects' Gardens," which was intended as a counterblast to "The Formal

(1) Reginald Blomfield and F. Inigo Thomas, The Formal Garden in England. 249 pp. Sixty-seven illustrations. 5'' x 8''. First edition, Third edition, 1901. London: Macmillan.

1892.

Garden," and to Sedding's "Garden-craft." Before the year ended it had met a spirited reply from Blomfield. Robinson's book reached by no means as high a plane of usefulness and interest as that admirable work, also from his pen, "The English Flower Garden." Thus far, the books of which we have spoken have dealt exclusively with the design of gardens, and with the arrangement of their constituent parts and only remotely with the things grown therein. But with "The English Flower Garden" it is different. It is chiefly a discourse upon the plants that are grown in the British Islands, their habits, the positions most suitable for them, the best ways of cultivating them, their forms and colors. Robinson's knowledge of this subject is vast. His sympathy with growing things and his enthusiasm for them are very stimulating. The book is much more than a list of plants with cultural directions. Opening it at random, one is sure to come upon a passage so full of matter and so interesting, that he is constrained to read it to the end. For us in America, its only drawback is that it treats of plants under English conditions often so different from our own as to impair for us the value of many of the writer's statements. Apart from the specific object so worthily filled by the book, it has a lengthy introduction largely given up to an able exposition of the landscape gardener's point of view, and of his theory and practice. It is a fair statement of all that is best in the "natural method," and it contains much that not even the staunchest advocate of the formal would wish to gainsay. But, though he has firmly fixed ideas about design, Mr. Robinson is less a garden artist than a horticulturalist. For him, in his own words, "the true use and first reason of a garden is to keep and grow for us plants not in our woods and mostly from other countries than our own." Great is the difference between this way of looking at the thing and that of Sedding, for whom a garden is “man's

(1) W. Robinson, The English Flower Garden. 866 pp. Many hundred illustrations. 6" x 9". First edition, 1883. Eighth edition, London: Murray, 1901.