e
opposite extremes are often found side by side--taste for what is
natural with taste for what is artificial. Garden style is always a
delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we
respect her ways or wish to impose our own. The impulse towards the
modern French gardening came from Italy. Ancient and modern times
both had to do with it. At the Renaissance there was a return to
Pliny's style,[11] which the Cinque cento gardens copied. In this
style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, and marble statues placed
against them, 'to break the uniformity of the dark green with
pleasant silhouettes. One looks almost in vain for flowers and turf;
even trees were exiled to a special wilderness at the edge of the
garden; but the great ornament of the whole was never missing, the
wide view over sunny plains and dome-capt towns, or over the distant
shimmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in
classic days.'[12]

The old French garden as Maitre Lenotre laid it out in Louis XIV.'s
time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was architectural in
design, and directly connected, like Pliny's, with various parts of
the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. Every part of
it--from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace,
designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of
orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains--belonged to one
symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the house, standing free
from trees, and visible from every point. Farther off, radiating
avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little
intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite
object--obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of bowers,
giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the
park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by
a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. Artifice was the
governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not speak but only
supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this
taste and this art. Hills and woods were only hindrances; the
straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and
"cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the landscape eye
of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt
artificialities.'[13]

Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will;
they