GARDEN ARCHITECTURE.
THE English country house at the Paris Exhibition is a reproduction of an old manor house at Bradford-on- Avon. It belongs to what is fortunately a very large class of houses of a particular kind and style scattered all over England, raised at the time when riches first accumulated in the late Tudor period, when it was said that "all England was like a stonemason's yard." Some genius of the day contrived to assimilate with the existing style of crenellated houses much of the decoration and proportion of the Palladian style, the intellectual side of which Arthur Clough pro- tested was "too rational far, too earthly" for Christian churches, and was, and is, too coldly exact for English taste to tolerate for houses in the form it took in Italy, but which, after it had suffered a sea change in crossing the Channel, and incorporated with the gables and oriels of tke earlier Tudor times, took its place with truth and conformity in the setting of our English scenery. In the pages of Country Life there have recently appeared at least a hundred such houses, from the calibre of Hengmve Hall, or Hatfield, or Blickling, to the smaller country houses like that reproduced in the Paris Exhibition, each and every one of which would realise the ideal of a country house as it dimly takes shape in the mind of the average educated Englishman. But in nearly every case the charm :..nd attraction is not in the house alone. At least as much, and possibly more, is due to the gardens, and the garden architec- ture, understood in the widest sense, which surrounds these creations of the late Tudor - Romanesque, which were magnified, though not improved, later, when the attempt was made, and became fashionable, to transport the Italian palace unmodified into English landscape. "Men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely;" and the English house at Paris can never give to the world the full notion of what the English country home is like, when the garden, formal or natural, or both combined, is absent.
At the present moment the laying out of gardens and their embellishment by garden architecture is one of the practical interests of the pleasant side of life. More country houses are being built, and more money and thought expended on them, than at any time since the early Stuarts. Know- ledge and taste preside over the making of the new houses and the new gardens in a greater degree than at any time during the reign. Flower gardening was never so successful or so eagerly enjoyed. The growth of flowers is not permanent, and consequently less costly than the other and structural adorn- ment of gardens. It is possible to change the whole character of a flower garden in a few years, and at no great expense. Garden architecture is both permanent and costly, and if mis- takes are made the experiment is matter of lasting regret ; yet there is a great and growing inclination to indulge this form of fancy, and architects and owners alike are constantly drawing on the ancient and existing models of this art for hints, suggestions, and examples of what they can reproduce. Much of the beauty of the new English homes, which in a hundred years will be old English homes, depends on whether they are successful or not in this revival. It must not be slavish or merely imitative. More harm was done to our country homes of the stately kind by " cribbing " wholesale ideas and details from vast palaces like Versailles than was done to our churches by carpenter's Gothic.
But terraces, of gravel or stone or green turf, or passing from one to the other in natural order from the house to the lawns, and with the terraces, the balustrades or walls that support them and border them, and the graceful steps from terrace to terrace, said the combinations of walls and steps with fences of yew and holly, the light material of garden architecture, are made well or ill, to be graceful or heavy, elegant or vulgar, as the architect has studied or neglected the models in the ancient gardens of England, or applied the principles of true propor- tion. "Embellishments," the imported objects of metal and stone brought into gardens and set up, or as part of a scheme of ornament, are matters over which taste differs. Of the standard ornaments, the old gardens, stately and other- wise, offer a great variety of examples which we may choose or avoid in the new "ordering of gardens." Some are as much an integral part of garden architecture as vases or sculpture are of the parapets and pediments of certain orders of building. Others are part of the structure itself. Such are the gates and the gate-posts at the entrances in the walls of the garden or the balustrades of terraces. Some, again, are appropriate and peculiar to gardens, as pillar sun-dials, while some, like vases and statues, are ornaments with no natural affinity to gardens, except such as private taste or association invests them with. Of gates, of wrought iron or bronze, there cannot be too many. They are and have been among the best features of our garden accessories. There are hundreds of these exquisite pieces of native ironwork in the old gardens. At this moment the demand for them for the new houses is met from abroad. The owners of French demesnes and chateaux, even the houses of Italy and Spain, and German castles, are selling them for export to England. The posts of the gates, the railings and wings, all these are the object of care and thought to the good garden architect. Lord Bacon would have had no walls of stone or brick. His fancy was for a green wall,—" an arched hedge, the arches to be upon pillars of carpenter's work." It would be difficult to work on Bacon's plan. No one can tell what his hedge grew upon,—unless it was to be planted in earth laid upon the arches. Nor would any one want his glass balls and wooden birdcages let into the fence. Perhaps the builders of his day thought he was less successful as a garden architect than in the perfect thinking out of his wilderness, or "heath," which was to be part of his garden. Walls, as they were and are built in gardens of the dignified order, are the most important factor in the whole. They should be solid and lofty, and have a bevelled coping, and end in pillars, with balls or a device upon the top. Most of the walls should be covered with well-trained flowering trees, the older the better; they are the tapestry of garden walls, and should match them. Niches in walls and sum- mer-houses of stone are useless. They bold dirt, and serve no purpose. In hot Italy the stone grottoes gave grateful coolness. Here they are mouldy and rheumatic. We never saw a garden " temple " which was used. The pavilion which William of Orange built at Hampton Court overlooking the river was used. But it had a kitchen, and was to all purpose a house.
Of two embellishments common to old gardens and good, one is of the essence of the garden; and the second almost as true to the spirit of the place, if architecture plays any part in the design. The first is the sun-dial on its pillar, and the second the fountain. Paved stone paths, set flat among grass, are a third, though minor, accessory never out of place. The dial is the link between the garden and sun; and the fountain the visible emblem of earth's refreshment, and the token that the third element is there as well as earth and air. Bacon was quite sane and practical in his views on fountains. He wished them, above all, to spout or hold water, and not to be an excuse for a load of carved stone, and always to be clean, "without any fish, or slime, or mud." But he would have sculpture there, and even gilding. Our modern sculptors might turn to the designing of fountains in their lighter moments more often than they do. They are suited to gardens of every size, and even to the little paved court or path before a summer " cottage " as rich men now build them. There is always coolness and refreshment in the spraying drops. Are statues in gardens to be included in the modem revival P In the "princely gardens" probably; in the home gardens perhaps. Sentiment and time have invested the statues, originally so strange to our gardens and climate, with the sense of fitness and association. The marble, or cold stone, or figures in bronze and lead, of Diana or Apollo, or Faunus or the Nymphs, have gathered our affection as they have gathered moss and lichens and the stains of the weather. "Statues and such things are added for state and magnificence, but are nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," said Bacon. To many minds they are even incongruous, because nude figures are impossible in reality in such a place and under such skies. If there are statues at all they would prefer them to be those of animals, like the dog of Alcibiades or the Erymanthian boar, seen in the old Botanic Gardens at Oxford, or eagles and winged horses,—" a stately arms." But there are minds in which fancy and imagination find a pleasant stimulus in the sight of the figures made in ancient Greece, and thence transported to old Italy, standing in the green vistas of English gardens, and backed by the ilex and the pines which our ancestors brought from the lands where the statues were indigenous. They may have done so from pride or princeli- ness; but it is not impossible that they, too, wished to create a visible image of "the intelligible forms of ancient poets, the fair realities of old religion," in a land where Nature was beautiful indeed, but in which human ideals of natural beauty and goodness in God's best handiwork, the human form, had never yet found adequate expression.
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