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The French garden was a creation of all epochs from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and, for the most part, those of to-day and of later decades of the nineteenth century, are adaptations and restorations of the classic accepted forms.

From the modest jardinet of the moyen-age to the ample gardens and parterres of the Renaissance was a wide range. In their highest expression these early French gardens, with their broderies and carreaux may well be compared as works of art with contemporary structures in stone or wood or stuffs in woven tapestries, which latter they greatly resembled.

Under Louis XIV and Louis XV the elaborateness of the French garden was even more an accentuated epitome of the tastes of the period. Near the end of the eighteenth century a marked deterioration was noticeable and a separation of the tastes which ordained the arrangement of contemporary dwellings and their gardens was very apparent. Under the Empire the antique style of furniture and decoration was used too, but there was no contemporary expression with regard to garden making.

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the Second Empire, the symmetrical lines of the old-time parterres came again into being, and to them were attached composite elements or motives, which more closely resembled details of the conventional English garden than anything distinctly French.

The English garden was, for the most part, pure affectation in France, or, at best, it was treated as a frank exotic. Even to-day, in modern France, where an old dwelling of the period of Henri IV, François I, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, or Louis XV still exists with its garden, the latter is more often than not on the classically pure French lines, while that of a modern cottage, villa or chateau is often a poor, variegated thing, fantastic to distraction.

Turning back the pages of history one finds that each people, each century, possessed its own specious variety of garden; a species which responded sufficiently to the tastes and necessities of the people, to their habits and their aspirations.

Garden-making, like the art of the architect, differed greatly in succeeding centuries, and it is for this reason that the garden of the moyen-age, of the epoch of the Crusades, for example, did not bear the least resemblance to the more ample parterres of the Renaissance. Civilization was making great progress, and it was necessary that the gardens should be in keeping with a less restrained, more luxurious method of life.

If the gardens of the Renaissance marked a progress over the preaux and jardinets of mediævalism, those of Le Notre were a blossoming forth of the Renaissance seed. Regretfully, one cannot say as much for the garden plots of the eighteenth century, and it was only with the mid-nineteenth century that the general outlines took on a real charm and attractiveness again, and this was only achieved by going back to original principles.

The first gardens were the vergers and preaux, little checker-board squares of a painful primitiveness as compared with later standards. These squares, or carreaux, were often laid out in foliage and blossoming plants as suggestive as possible of their being made of carpeting or marble. When these miniature enclosures came to be surrounded with trellises and walls the Renaissance in garden-making may be considered as having been in full sway.

Under Louis XIV a certain affluence was noticeable in garden plots, and with Louis XV an even more notable symmetry was apparent in the disposition of the general outlines. By this time, the garden in France had become a frame which set off the architectural charms of the dwelling rather than remaining a mere accessory, but it was only with the replacing of the castle-fortress by the more domesticated chateau that a really generous garden space became a definite attribute of a great house.

The first gardens surrounding the French chateaux were developments, or adaptations, of Italian gardens, such as were designed across the Alps by Mercogliano, during the feudal period.

Later, and during the time of the Crusades, the garden question hardly entered into French life. Gardens, like all other luxuries, were given little thought when the graver questions of peace and security were to be considered, and, for this reason, there is little or nothing to say of French gardens previous to the twelfth century.

An important species of the gardens of the moyen-age was that which was found as an adjunct to the great monastic institutions, the preaux, which were usually surrounded by the cloister colonnade. One of the most important of these, of which history makes mention, was that of the Abbaye de Saint Gall, of which Charlemagne was capitular. It was he who selected the plants and vegetables which the dwellers therein should cultivate.

Of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is an abundant literary record, and, in a way, a pictorial record as well. From these one can make a very good deduction of what the garden of that day was like; still restrained, but yet something more than rudimentary. From now on French gardens were divided specifically into the potager and verger.

The potager was virtually a vegetable garden within the walls which surrounded the seigneurial dwelling, and was of necessity of very limited extent, chiefly laid out in tiny carreaux, or beds, bordered by tiles or bricks, much as a small city garden is arranged to-day. Here were cultivated the commonest vegetables, a few flowers and a liberal assortment of herbs, such as rue, mint, parsley, sage, lavender, etc.

The verger, or viridarium, was practically a fruit garden, as it is to-day, with perhaps a generous sprinkling of flowers and aromatic plants. The verger was always outside the walls, but not far from the entrance or the drawbridge crossing the moat and leading to the chateau.

It was to the verger, or orchard, curiously enough, that in times of peace the seigneur and his family retired after luncheon for diversion or repose.

"D illocques vieng en cest vergier

Eascuns jour pour s'esbanoier."

Thus ran a couplet of the "Roman de Thèbes"; and of the hundred or more tales of chivalry in verse, which are recognized as classic, nearly all make mention of the verger.

It was here that young men and maidens came in springtime for the fête of flowers, when they wove chaplets and garlands, for the moyen-age had preserved the antique custom of the coiffure of flowers, that is to say hats of natural flowers, as we might call them to-day, except that modern hats seemingly call for most of the products of the barnyard and the farm in their decoration, as well as the flowers of the field.

Henri IV in an Old French Garden

The rose was queen among all these flowers and then came the lily and the carnation, chiefly in their simple, savage state, not the highly cultivated product of to-day. From the ballads and the love songs, one gathers that there were also violets, eglantine, daisies, pansies, forget-me-nots, and the marguerite, or consoude, was one of the most loved of all.

The carnation, or œillet, was called armerie; the pansy was particularly in favour with the ladies, who embroidered it on their handkerchiefs and their girdles. Still other flowers found a place in this early horticultural catalogue, the marigold, gladiolus, stocks, lily-of-the-valley and buttercups.

Frequently the verger was surrounded by a protecting wall, of more or less architectural pretense, with towers and accessories conforming to the style of the period, and decorative and utilitarian fountains, benches and seats were also common accessories.

The old prints, which reproduced these early French gardens, are most curious to study, amusing even; but their point of view was often distorted as to perspective. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perspective was almost wholly ignored in pictorial records. There was often no scale, and no depth; everything was out of proportion with everything else, and for this reason it is difficult to judge of the exact proportions of many of these early French gardens.

The origin of garden-making in France, in the best accepted sense of the term, properly began with the later years of the thirteenth century and the early years of the fourteenth; continuing the tradition, remained distinctly French until the mid-fifteenth century, for the Italian influence did not begin to make itself felt until after the Italian wars and travels of Charles VIII, Louis XI and Francis I.

The earliest traces of the work of the first two of these monarchs are to be seen at Blois and, for a time henceforth, it is to be presumed that all royal gardens in France were largely conceived under the inspiration of Italian influences. Before, as there were primitives in the art of painting in France, there were certainly French gardeners in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of these, whoever he may have been, was the designer of the preaux and the treilles of the Louvre of Charles V, of which a pictorial record exists, and he, or they, did work of a like nature for the powerful house of Bourgogne, and for René d'Anjou, whom we know was a great amateur gardener.

The archives of these princely houses often recount the expenses in detail, and so numerous are certain of them that it would not be difficult to picture anew as to just what they referred.

Debanes, the gardener of the Chateau d'Angers, on a certain occasion, gave an accounting for "X Sols" for repairing the grass-plots and for making a petit preau. Again: "XI Sols" for the employ of six gardeners to trim the vines and clean up the alleys of the grand and petit jardin.

Luxury in all things settled down upon all France to a greater degree than hitherto in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and almost without exception princely houses set out to rival one another in the splendour of their surroundings. Now came in the ornamental garden as distinct from the verger, and the preau became a greensward accessory, at once practical and decorative, the precursor of the pelouse and the parterre of Le Notre.

The preau (in old French prael) was a symmetrical square or rectangular grass-grown garden plot. From the Latin pratum, or pratellum, the words preau, pré and prairie were evolved naturally enough, and came thus early to be applied in France to that portion of the pleasure garden set out as a grassy lawn. The word is very ancient, and has come down to us through the monkish vocabulary of the cloister.

Some celebrated verse of Christine de Pisan, who wrote "The Life of Charles V," thus describes the cloister at Poissy.

"Du cloistre grand large et especieux

Que est carré, et, afin qu'il soit mieulx

A un prael, ou milieu, gracieux

Vert sans grappin

Ou a planté en my un très hault pin."

It was at this period, that of Saint Louis and the apotheosis of Gothic architecture, that France was at the head of European civilization, therefore in no way can her preëminence in garden-making be questioned.

The gardens of the Gothic era seldom surpassed the enclos with a rivulet passing through it, a spring, a pine tree giving a welcome shade, some simple flowers and a verger of fruit trees.

The neighbours of France were often warring among themselves but the Grand Seigneur here was settling down to beautifying his surroundings and framing his chateaux, manors and country-seats in dignified and most appealing pictures. Grass-plots appeared in dooryards, flowers climbed up along castle walls and shrubs and trees came to play a genuinely esthetic rôle in the life of the times.

An illustrious stranger, banished from Italy, one Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who had sought a refuge in France, wrote his views on the matter, which in substance were as above.

About this time originated the progenitors of the gloriettes, which became so greatly the vogue in the eighteenth century. Practically the gloriette, a word in common use in northern France and in Flanders, was a logette de plaisance. The Spaniards, too, in their glorietta, a pavilion in a garden, had practically the same signification of the word.

In the fourteenth century French garden the gloriette was a sort of arbour, or trellis-like summer-house, garnished with vines and often perched upon a natural or artificial eminence. Other fast developing details of the French garden were tree-bordered alleys and the planting of more or less regularly set-out beds of flowering plants.

Vine trellises and vine-clad pavilions and groves were a speedy development of these details, and played parts of considerable importance in gardening under the French Renaissance.

In this same connection there is a very precise record in an account of the gardens of the Louvre under Charles V concerning the contribution of one, Jean Baril, maker of Arlors, to this form of the landscape architect's art.

"Ornamental birds—peacocks, pheasants and swans now came in as adjuncts to the French land and water garden." This was the way a certain pertinent comment was made by a writer of the fifteenth century. From the "Ménagier de Paris," a work of the end of the fourteenth century, one learns that behind a dwelling of a prince or noble of the time was usually to be found a "beau jardin tout planté d'arbres à fruits, de legumes, de rosiers, orné de volières et tapisé de gazon sur lesquels se promènent les paons."

French gardens of various epochs are readily distinguished by the width of their alleys. In the moyen-age the paths which separated the garden plots were very narrow; in the early Renaissance period they were somewhat wider, taking on a supreme maximum in the gardens of Le Notre.

Trimmed trees entered into the general scheme in France towards the end of the fifteenth century. Under Henri IV and under Louis XII trees were often trimmed in ungainly, fantastic forms, but with the advent of Le Notre the good taste which he propagated so widely promptly rejected these grotesques, which, for a fact, were an importation from Flanders, like the gloriettes. Not by the remotest suggestion could a clipped yew in the form of a peacock or a giraffe be called French. Le Notre eliminated the menagerie and the aviary, but kept certain geometrical forms, particularly with respect to hedges, where niches were frequently trimmed out for the placing of statues, columns surmounted with golden balls, etc.

The most famous of the frankly Renaissance gardens developed as a result of the migrations of the French monarchs in Italy were those surrounding such palaces and chateaux as Fontainebleau, Amboise, and Blois. Often these manifestly French gardens, though of Italian inspiration in the first instance, were actually the work of Italian craftsmen. Pucello Marceliano at four hundred livres and Edme Marceliano at two hundred livres were in the employ of Henri II. It was the former who laid out the magnificent Parterre de Diane at Chenonceaux, where Catherine de Médici later, being smitten with the skill of the Florentines, gave the further commission of the Jardin Vert, which was intended to complete this parterre, to Henri le Calabrese and Jean Collo.

"Parterre de Diane," Chenonceaux

The later Renaissance gardens divided themselves into various classes, jardins de plaisir, jardins de plaisance, jardins de propreté, etc. Parterres now became of two sorts, parterres à compartiments and parterres de broderies, names sufficiently explicit not to need further comment.

It is difficult to determine just how garden broderies came into being. They may have been indirectly due to woman's love of embroidery and the garden alike. The making of these garden broderies was a highly cultivated art. Pierre Vallet, embroiderer to Henri IV, created much in his line of distinction and note, and acquired an extensive clientele for his flowers and models. Often these gardens, with their parterres and broderies were mere additions to an already existing architectural scheme, but with respect to the gardens of the Luxembourg and Saint Germain-en-Laye they came into being with the edifices themselves, or at least those portions which they were supposed to embellish. Harmony was then first struck between the works of the horticulturist—the garden-maker—and those of the architect—the builder in stone and wood. This was the prelude to those majestic ensembles of which Le Notre was to be the composer.

Of the celebrated French palace and chateau gardens which are not centered upon the actual edifices with which they are more or less intimately connected, but are distinct and apart from the gardens which in most cases actually surround a dwelling, may be mentioned those of Montargis, Saint Germain, Amboise, Villers-Cotterets and Fontainebleau. These are rather parks, like the "home-parks," so called, in England, which, while adjuncts to the dwellings, are complete in themselves and are possessed of a separate identity, or reason for being. Chiefly these, and indeed most French gardens of the same epoch, differ greatly from contemporary works in Italy in that the latter were often built and terraced up and down the hillsides, whereas the French garden was laid out, in the majority of instances, on the level, though each made use of interpolated architectural accessories such as balustrades, statuary, fountains, etc.

Mollet was one of the most famous gardeners of the time of Louis XIV. He was the gardener of the Duc d'Aumale, who built the gardens of the Chateau d'Anet while it was occupied by Diane de Poitiers, and for their time they were considered the most celebrated in France for their upkeep and the profusion and variety of their flowers. This was the highest development of the French garden up to this time.

It is possible that this Claude Mollet was the creator of the parterres and broderies so largely used in his time, and after. Mollet's formula was derived chiefly from flower and plant forms, resembling in design oriental embroideries. He made equal use of the labyrinth and the sunken garden. His idea was to develop the simple parquet into the elaborate parterre. He began his career under Henri III and ultimately became the gardener of Henri IV. His elaborate work "Theatre des Plans et Jardinage" was written towards 1610-1612, but was only published a half a century later. It was only in the sixteenth century that gardens in Paris were planned and developed on a scale which was the equal of many which had previously been designed in the provinces.

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The chief names in French gardening—before the days of Le Notre—were those of the two Mollets, the brothers Boyceau, de la Barauderie and Jacques de Menours, and all successively held the post of Superintendent of the Garden of the King.

In these royal gardens there was always a distinctly notable feature, the grand roiales, the principal avenues, or alleys, which were here found on a more ambitious scale than in any of the private gardens of the nobility. The central avenue was always of the most generous proportions, the nomenclature coming from royal—the grand roial being the equivalent of Allée Royale, that is, Avenue Royal.

By the end of the sixteenth century the Garden of the Tuileries, which was later to be entirely transformed by Le Notre, offered an interesting aspect of the parquet at its best. In "Paris à Travers les Ages" one reads that from the windows of the palace the garden resembled a great checker-board containing more than a hundred uniform carreaux. There were six wide longitudinal alleys or avenues cut across by eight or ten smaller alleys which produced this rectangular effect. Within some of the squares were single, or grouped trees; in others the conventional quincunx; others were mere expanses of lawn, and still others had flowers arranged in symmetrical patterns. In one of these squares was a design which showed the escutcheons of the arms of France and those of the Médici. These gardens of the Tuileries were first modified by a project of Bernard Palissy, the porcelainiste. He let his fancy have full sway and the criss-cross alleys and avenues were set out at their junctures with moulded ornaments, enamelled miniatures, turtles in faience and frogs in porcelain. It was this, perhaps, which gave the impetus to the French for their fondness to-day for similar effects, but Bernard Palissy doubtless never went so far as plaster cats on a ridgepole, as one may see to-day on many a pretty villa in northern France. This certainly lent an element of picturesqueness to the Renaissance Garden of the Louvre, a development of the same spirit which inspired this artist in his collaboration at Chenonceaux. This was the formula which produced the jardin délectable, an exaggeration of the taste of the epoch, but still critical of its time.

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The gardens of the Renaissance readily divided themselves into two classes, those of the parterres à compartiments and those of the parterres de broderies. The former, under Francis I and Henri II, were divided into geometrical compartments thoroughly in the taste of the Renaissance, but bordered frequently with representations of designs taken from Venetian lace and various other contemporary stuffs. There were other parterres, where the compartments were planned on a more utilitarian scale; in other words, they were the potagers which rendered the garden, said Olivier de Serres, one of "profitable beauty." Some of the compartments were devoted entirely to herbs and medicinal plants while others were entirely given over to flowers. In general the compartments were renewed twice a year, in May and August.

The Grand Parterre at Fontainebleau, called in other days the Parterre de Tiber, offered as remarkable an example of the terrace garden as was to be found in France, the terraces rising a metre or more above the actual garden plot and enclosing a sort of horticultural arena.

It was in the sixteenth century that architectural motives came to be incorporated into the gardens in the form of square, round or octagonal pavilions, and here and there were added considerable areas of tiled pavements, features which were found at their best in the gardens of the Chateau de Gaillon and at Langeais.

One special and distinct feature of the French Renaissance garden was the labyrinth, of which three forms were known. The first was composed of merely low borders, the second of hedges shoulder high, or even taller, and the third was practically a roofed-over grove. The latter invention was due, it is said, to the discreet Louis XIV. In the Tuileries garden, in the time of Catherine de Médici, there was a labyrinth greatly in vogue with the Parisian nobles who "found much pleasure in amusing themselves therein."

In that garden the labyrinth was sometimes called the "Road of Jerusalem" and it was presumably of eastern origin.

In the seventeenth century grottos came to be added to the garden, though this is seemingly an Italian tradition of much earlier date. Among the notable grottos of this time were that of the Jardin des Pins at Fontainebleau, and that of the Chateau de Meudon, built by Philibert Delorme, of which Ronsard celebrated its beauties in verse. The art was not confined to the gardens of royalties and the nobility, for the bourgeoisie speedily took up with the puerile idea (said to have come from Holland, by the way), and built themselves grottos of shells, plaster and boulders. It was then that the chiens de faience, which the smug Paris suburbanite of to-day so loves, were born.

By the seventeenth century the equalized carreaux of the early geometrically disposed gardens were often replaced with the oblongs, circles and, somewhat timidly introduced, more bizarre forms, the idea being to give variety to the ensemble. There was less fear for the artistic effect of great open spaces than had formerly existed, and the avenues and alleys were considerably enlarged, and such architectural and sculptural accessories as fountains, balustrades and perrons were designed on a more extensive scale. Basins and canals and other restrained surfaces of water began to appear on a larger scale, and greater insistence was put upon their proportions with regard to the decorative part which they were to play in the ensemble.

This was the preparatory period of the coming into being of the works of Le Notre and Mansart.

The Grand Siècle lent a profound majesty to royal and noble dwellings, and its effect is no less to be remarked upon than the character of their gardens. The moving spirit which ordained all these things was the will of the Roi Soleil.

Parterres and broderies were designed on even a grander scale than before. They were frequently grouped into four equal parts with a circular basin in the centre, and mirror-like basins of water sprang up on all sides.

Close to the royal dwelling was the fore-court, as often dressed out with flowers and lawn as with tiles and flags. From it radiated long alleys and avenues, stretching out almost to infinity. At this time the grass-plots were developed to high order, and there were groves, rest-houses, bowers, and theatres de verdure at each turning. Tennis-courts came to be a regularly installed accessory, and the basins and "mirrors" of water were frequently supplemented by cascades, and some of the canals were so large that barges of state floated thereon. Over some of the canals bridges were built as fantastic in design as those of the Japanese, and again others as monumental as the Pont Neuf.

In their majestic regularity the French gardens of the seventeenth century possessed an admirable solemnity, albeit their amplitude and majesty give rise to justifiable criticism. It is this criticism that qualifies the values of such gardens as those of Versailles and Vaux, but one must admit that the scale on which they were planned has much to do with this, and certainly if they had been attached to less majestic edifices the comment would have been even more justifiable. As it is, the criticism must be qualified.

The aspect of the garden by this time had been greatly modified. Aside from such great ensembles as those of Versailles was now to be considered a taste for something smaller, but often overcrowded with accessories of the same nature, which compared so well with the vastness of Versailles, but which, on the other hand, looked so out of place in miniature.

It was not long now before the "style pompadour" began to make itself shown with regard to garden design—the exaggeration of an undeniable grace by an affected mannerism. All the rococco details which had been applied to architecture now began to find their duplication in the garden rockeries—weird fantasies built of plaster and even shells of the sea.

By later years of the eighteenth century there came on the scene as a designer of gardens one, De Neufforge. His work was a prelude to the classicism of the style of Louis XVI which was to come. There was, too, at this time a disposition towards the English garden, but only a slight tendency, though towards 1780 the conventional French garden had been practically abandoned. The revolution in the art of garden-making therefore preceded that of the world of politics by some years.

There are three or four works which give specific details on these questions. They are "De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance," by Blondel (1773), his "Cours d'Architecture" of the same date, and Panseron's volume entitled "Recueil de Jardinage," published in 1783.

The following brief résumé shows the various steps through which the French formal garden passed. In the moyen-age the garden was a thing quite apart from the dwelling, and was but a diminutive dooryard sort of a garden. The garden of the Renaissance amplified the regular lines which existed in the moyen-age, but was often quite as little in accord with the dwelling that it surrounded as its predecessor.

The union of the garden and the dwelling and its dependencies was clearly marked under Louis XIV, while the gardens of Louis XV tended somewhat to modify the grand lines and the majestic presence of those of his elder. These gardens of Louis XV were more fantastic, and followed less the lines of traditional good taste. Shapes and forms were complicated and indeed inexplicably mixed into a mélange that one could hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but as a whole an aggravation.

Finally the reaction came for something more simple and more in harmony with rational taste.

The best example remaining of the Louis XV garden is that which surrounds the Pavillon de Musique of the Petit Trianon, an addition to the garden which Louis XIV had given to the Grand Trianon. By comparison with the big garden of Le Notre this latter conception is as a boudoir to a reception hall.

The garden of Louis XVI was a composite, with interpolations from across the Rhine, from Holland and Belgium and from England even; features which got no great hold, however, but which, for a time, gave it an air less French than anything which had gone before.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century the formal garden was practically abandoned in France. It was the period of the real decadence of the formal garden. This came not from one cause alone but from many. To the straight lines and gentle curves of former generations upon generations of French gardens were added sinuosities as varied and complicated as those of the Vale of Cashmere, and again, with tiny stars and crescents and what not, the ground resembled an ornamental ceiling more than it did a garden. The sentimentalism of the epoch did its part, and accentuated the desire to carry out personal tastes rather than build on traditionally accepted lines. The taste for the English garden grew apace in France, and many a noble plantation was remodelled on these lines, or rooted up altogether. Immediately neighbouring upon the dwelling the garden still bore some resemblance to its former outlines, but, as it drew farther away, it became a park, a wildwood or a preserve.

Isabey Père, a miniaturist, under Napoleonic stimulus, designed a number of French gardens in the early years of the nineteenth century, following more or less the conventional lines of the best work of the seventeenth century, and succeeded admirably in a small way in resuscitating the fallen taste. Isabey's gardens may have lacked much that was remarkable in the best work of Le Notre, but they were considerably better than anything of a similar nature, so far as indicating a commendable desire to return to better ideals.

Under the Second Empire a great impulse was given to garden design and making in Paris itself. It was then that the parks and squares came really to enter into the artistic conception of what a city beautiful should be.

Leaving the gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg out of the question, the Parc Monceau and that of the Buttes Chaumont of to-day, the descendants of these first Paris gardens show plainly how thoroughly good they were in design and execution.

The majority of professional gardeners of renown in France made their first successes with the gardens of the city of Paris, reproducing the best of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century work, which had endured without the competition of later years having dulled its beauty, though perhaps the parterres of to-day are rather more warm in colouring, even cruder, than those of a former time.

The jardin fleuriste and the parterre horticole of the nineteenth century appealed however quite as much in their general arrangement and the modification of their details and their rainbow colours, as any since the time of Louis XVI. According to the expert definition the jardin fleuriste was a "garden reserved exclusively to the culture and ornamental disposition of plants giving forth rich leaves and beautiful flowers." The above quoted description is decidedly apt.

The seventeenth century French garden formed a superb framing for the animated fêtes and reunions in which took part such a brilliant array of lords and ladies of the court as may have been invited to taste the delicacies of a fête amid such luxurious appointments.

The fashionable and courtly life of the day, so far as its open-air aspect was concerned, centered around these gardens and parks of the great houses of royalty and the nobility. The costume of the folk of the time, with cloak and sword and robes of silk and velvet and gilded carriages and chaises-à-porteurs, had little in common with the out-of-door garden-party life of to-day, where the guests arrive in automobiles, be-rugged and be-goggled and somewhat the worse for a dusty journey. It is for this reason that Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, in spite of the suggestion of sumptuousness which they still retain, are, from all points of view, more or less out of scale with the life of our times.

Bassin de la Couronne, Vaux-le-Vicomte

The modern garden, whether laid out in regular lines, or on an ornamental scale, as a flower garden purely, or in a composite style, is usually but an adjunct to the modern chateau, villa or cottage. It is more intimate than the vast, more theatrically disposed area of old, and is more nearly an indication of the personal tastes of the owner because of its restrained proportions.