Essay on Modern Gardening

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Kirgate Press, 1904 - Landscape architecture - 94 pages

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Page 29 - Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain...
Page 39 - ... fountains and water-works. If the hill had not ended with the lower garden, and the wall were not bounded by a common way that goes through the park, they might have added a third quarter of all greens ; but this want is supplied by a garden on the other side the house, which is all of that sort, very wild, shady, and adorned with rough rock-work and fountains.
Page 43 - But I should hardly advise any of these attempts in the figure of gardens among us ; they are adventures of too hard achievement for any common hands ; and though there may be more honour if they succeed well, yet there is more dishonour if they fail, and it is twenty to one they will ; whereas, in regular figures, it is hard to make any great and remarkable faults.
Page 5 - Four acres was the allotted space of ground, Fenced with a green enclosure all around. Tall thriving trees confess'd the fruitful mould : The reddening apple ripens here to gold. Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows, With deeper red the full pomegranate glows : The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, And verdant olives flourish round the year.
Page 69 - Lord approaches, announces the habitation of some man of distinction. In other places the total banishment of all particular neatness immediately about a house, which is frequently left gazing by itself in the middle of a park, is a defect. Sheltered and even close walks in so very uncertain a climate as ours, are comforts ill exchanged for the few picturesque days that we enjoy: and whenever a family can purloin a warm and even...
Page 41 - What I have said, of the best forms of gardens, is meant only of such as are in some sort regular; for there may be other forms wholly irregular that may, for aught I know, have more beauty than any of the others...
Page 35 - The perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw, either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park in Hertfordshire, when I knew it about thirty years ago. It was made by the Countess of Bedford...
Page 25 - ... the intricacy of the woods and various lodges buried in covert might conceal her actual habitation. It is more extraordinary that having so long ago stumbled on the principle of modern gardening, we should have persisted in retaining its reverse, symmetrical and unnatural gardens.

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