The Garden Beautiful - W Robinson

Excerpt from The Garden Beautiful: Home Woods and Home Landscape
England have been made in Victorian days: the Crystal Palace, the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Kensington, Shrubland, Witley Court, Castle Howard, Mentmore, Crewe Hall, Alton Towers, and many places in every county. During the whole of that period there was hardly a country seat laid out that was not marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and patterned thing. So far from formal gardens being abolished, as the Irish peasant said of absentees, 'the country is full of them! With Castle Howards, Trent hams, and Chatsworths staring at him, it is ludicrous to see a young architect weeping over their loss. Even when there is no money to waste in needless walls and gigantic water-squirts, the idea of the terrace is still carried out - often in plains, and in the shape of green banks piled one above the other, as if they were an artistic treat. There are hundreds of such gardens about the country, and the ugliest and most formally set out and planted gardens ever made in England were formed in Victorian days, when we are told by writers who do not look into the facts that all these things were lost.
It cannot be too clearly seen that 'formal' gardens of the 'most deplorable type are things of our own time, as it is only in our own time that the common idea that there is only one way of making a garden has been spread. Hence, in all the newer houses we see the stereotyped garden often made in spite of all the needs of the ground, whereas in old times it was not so, because in those days the stereotyped plans were not in every office and people had to think of the ground itself. Berkeley is not the same as Sutton, and Sutton is quite different from Haddon.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.