The landscape gardening book Author:Grace Tabor 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: CHAPTER III The Style Of A Garden AjL the lovely gardens of the world are ours to draw suggestions from. Let us do just that, and stop there, scorning ever t... more »o copy. When all is said and done, let us have, here in America, American gardens—not imitation Italian, or English, or Dutch gardens, or any other sort. Italy, in the splendor of its gleaming, time-stained marbles and solemn cypress trees, is Italy adorned as its life, its climate, its social peculiarities and its evolution through twice a thousand years have adorned it. England, with her castles and ancient abbeys, and their moats and fish-ponds—relics of feudal days and cloistered monasteries—her clipped yews and velvet turf, is England after centuries of wars, of invasions, of murders and pilferings, and all the shifting conditions of life which these things bring. Is it not time we younger folks over here recognize this, and give up the ridiculous task of attempting to build Elizabethan and Italian gardens? Good taste and common sense would both seem to indicate that it is. There are three factors which have directed the evolution of these old-world gardens quite as definitely as they have directed the evolution of the races which built them. And these three factors are at work here among us now and they will always be at work among men, and will always so direct. Climate is one,though possibly the least important; the life of the people— their occupations, temperament, tastes and amusements—is another; their economic condition is the third. Of these three the first is predetermined beyond man's interference; the second is variable; the third is practically fixed, as far as a home site is concerned. If an owner's position changes economically he moves into the place which that change fits him for, whether it ...« less