Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHARTER III. GARDENING. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century the garden that had satisfied public taste was some form of the Ancient, Geometrical, Roman, Architectural, or Regular Gar- Gardening den, as it has been variously styled. In English literature this garden plays but a small part. In Evelyn's Diary we find many descriptions of French and Italian gardens which are eminently suggestive .as showing the taste of the age. His approbation is always given to proofs of ingenuity in the way of mechanical devices. We find the same general tone in a letter by Mallet. He had been traveling in Wales for six weeks, and had found the journey simply " tedious " till he came to Sir Arthur Owen's garden, which consisted of an acre and a half, laid out like a mariner's compass with a tree in the centre for the needle and a grove cut into thirty-two sections by paths answering to the points in the compass. This was the only remarkable thing Mallet saw in Wales.' The classical and the only important article on the Formal Garden before 1700 is by Sir William Temple.2 According to his taste Moor Park was the sweetest garden known. It was divided into quarters by gravel walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight statues in each quarter. Its terrace walk had a summerhouse at each end. On each side of the parterre was a cloister, over each cloister an airy walk, and so on. "Among us," he explains, " the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some; I certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities, our walks and! our trees ranged so as to answer one another and at exact distances." This sentence is especially interesting as show- ' Mallet in Letter to Pope (1734). Temple ; On the Gardens of Epicurus; or of Gardening in the year 1685. ing how completely t...