Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/225

 Marca 15, 1872. THE BUILDING NEWS. 209 THE BUILDING NEWS. | effect of Italian gardening is out of the ques- Se LONDON, FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 1872. GARDEN BUILDING. TE Government of Italy being now seated at Rome, Florence has ceased to be a capital city. The Florentines, however, are determined that their beloved Firenze shall not sink out of estimation because it nolonger contains a court, and the municipality, with the king’s patronage, have struck upon the idea of a new charm for the famous Tuscan town. All its neighbourhood is already a garden, blooming down the valley of the Arno; but it is contemplated to hold a competition next spring for re-embellishing the banks of the river by artificial cultivation, including a stately sweep of terrace architecture. ‘The Italians have a great genius for decorative gardening, although their style is somewhat formal; but the climate is in their favour. They are naturally tempted to build belve- deres ; perhaps their tastes are too geometrical to harmonise with Lord Bacon’s fancy, being rather consonant with the stiffnesses of Van- brugh, yet the forthcoming emulation may envolve ideas of a finer and more poetical kind. They are first to be i'lustrated, of course by drawings, models being decidedly rejected, and most properly, since the model of a garden suggests nothing better than a box of Christmas toys. A garden ought to be a picture, varied, cheer- ful, and abounding in elegant outlines. The maker of the little landscape, however, finds his difficulty the moment he has to introduce stone-work ; it may add a hundred graces or a hundred disfigurements to the ground exactly as his knowledge of principles be crude or pure, because, while nothing can be more agreeable than vases, balustrades, and steps properly disposed, nothing can be more ugly if ignorantly distributed. In large domains, the lodge and entrance gates are of great importance; in all, the situation of flower-beds is a subject of extreme delicacy ; but entrance sweeps, wing-walls, fences, posts, and chains are matters upon which sufficient attention is rarely bestowed. The Italians have a beautiful method in these respects, and their roadways flow, as it were, from the gates to the doors. They cut their paths where the surface is high, and fill them up where it is excessively hollow, unless, indeed, they can carry them round the slopes, which has a very attractive effect. And no Italian landscape gardener ever lays out a broad road on a private estate. Space for two carriages to pass is the utmost that your Florentine artist will tolerate. The Long Walk at Windsor, the avenues of Hampton Court, and the wide walks of Kensington Gardens are warnings. Of course, these rules vary in their application according to the pretensions of the place, and especially of the dwelling- house, but they are of general value, never- theless. Thus, in the case of trees, no com- petent person would load his landscape close to the mansion with a ponderous background of sycamores, elms, and beeches, if he could obtain cedar, yew, and thorn, or even larch or chestnut, with an occasional tulip tree. Authorities assure us that it is more difficult to accommodate a garden to a Gothic than to an Italian structure. They are probably right. At all events, under these circum- stances, balustrades are impossible; but, to make up for this deficiency, we have the bowling-green, the ivy bed, the ivy mound, the ivied wall, and ornaments in terra-cotta. Saye us, however, from the garden which habitually surrounds the ‘ Anglo-Italian” villa, built of stone of different colours, with a tower whence nothing is to be seen, a mass of cement made of road scrapings and clay, scarcely better than that hideous sham, ‘the Grecian style,” which is always a weak imita- tion of a temple. But, perhaps, the rich tion in this country, although more suitable for our verdure than the Dutch or French geometric ideals. Possibly, it is overladen with terraces, parapets, steps, basins, archi- tectural lawns, vases, fountains, and sculpture ; but it is, at any rate, superior to the affecta- tions of Holland, with their clipped trees, straight arcades, green arches, prim alleys, box, yew, and juniper mazes ; and the French fondness for grottoes, pavilions, and artificial slopes. Still, in the most elaborate of Italian grounds,a preference is displayed for suchasare architecturally embellished. The terrace is con- sidered indispensable—a handsome level, with a graceful balustrade carefully planted at the ends, with steps ‘‘ of soft ascent,” no rising pedestals or obstructive cornices, only one handrail, very moderate piers, and the simplest coping. It presents many obstacles, however, in certain instances, as when the house is at the top of a sloping valley and the terrace has to run between hill and hill; here the absence of a wall may be com- pensated for by a hedge, but this takes time in growing. In carrying a_balus- trade down a slope, says Mr, Arthur Hughes, one of our best writers on this sub- ject, extreme care is required. It should al- ways be horizontal, in lengths more or less long, regularly stepped down at convenient places. The same author lays it down as a rule that where ascents have to be made from one level to another, the number of steps should be uneven, so that the person using them may begin and finish the ascent with the same foot—a law the subtlety of which we fail to appreciate. In point of fact, there seems a tendency just now to render land- scape gardening too architectural, too much made up of walls, kerbs, and stone-work of all descriptions, after the fashion of the Crystal Palace grounds. As for the cupolas and temples which came in with the first and se- cond Georges, they are utterly abominable, and mark an era of irreclaimable vulgarity. They belong to the same period as terraces of masonry where none are required, flights of steps leading nowhere, vases stuck where- ever there is room for one, vile heaps of flint called rockeries, rustic seats pitched in all sorts of damp positions, sundials planted where no sun ever shines, ponds dug in marshy spots, and arch-works of wire, muddled up with conservatories, graperies, summer- houses, and roseries in atrocious confusion. We shall go back, before long, it may be feared, to the age of ‘‘ devices ” in evergreen, and of peacocks strutting before the drawing- room windows. Not that we would denounce all belvederes and bowers, especially on hillsides and by the sea-shore, or, as in the environs of Florence, where the prospect is of boundless beauty on everyside. In these respects Alton Towers and Harlaxton, though they want the Italian transparency of climate, are suggestive of Tivoli and the exquisite terrace-gardens of Naples, with their gay little pavilions, or loggias, overlooking the golden distance. But the treatment of these arrangements is a matter of peculiar care. Many persons so surround their kiosks with vases as to remind you of a pottery shop, whereas a vase properly introduced is a most graceful ornament. So with balls, which are apt to look like puddings, as vases are apt to look like tureens, though each of these re- semblances may easily be avoided. The vase, indeed, is more difficult to manage than the ball, running the risk, as it does, of being a colossal egg-cup, a Gothic goblet, a font, or a vegetable dish. Again, with reference to artificial centres of beds in masonry or terra-cotta, they are rarely successful, parti- cularly when water enters into the composi- tion. The French, upon the whole, excel both the English and the Italians in their garden fountains, making use of alabaster rockeries and economising water with wonder- ful ingenuity ; even when they do not dis- pense with it altogether, and trust to flowers. Their ‘ wall-cascades” have no equals in Europe, feeding, as they do, magnificent ferneries; whereas, in England, we have adopted a habit of fountam sculpture of a terrible mortuary design. The Fontana Trevi and §. Pietro in Montorio, at Rome, are, on the other hand, of most festal and luxurious appearance. Turning to garden buildings, properly so called, the first necessity is a seat, which is as often constructed for ornament, for closing up a vista, or finishing of a perspective, as for use, and it generally brings to mind the thought of a stone bench in a cemetery. Like summer - houses, garden seats are usually obnoxious to the charge of being intensely and hopelessly un- comfortable, though the Germans, to their credit, do not make them so. A summer- house, indeed, generally represents some sort of folly on the part of its builder. We haye seen structures of this class with glazed windows and fireplaces! Out- side staircases! Pompeian models fur- nished with Arnott’s patent stoves! massive masonry piled upon cumbrous sandstone ter- races ; in fact, the whole medley of what is known as Georgian. The French, generally speaking, are not remarkable for taste of any kind in connection with gardens; they build either too heavily or too fantastically, and use rainbows of dissonant colour; but their high-pitched roofs, seen among such trees as they possess, are effective, though they have an inveterate habit of fluting their columns, or working rustics on them, loading the panels with ornament, garlanding the capi- tals, carving, painting, and parapettmg, until the structure stares down the vista like some fairy fancy on the stage. Far more picturesque than the French pavilion is the old-fashioned English rustic house of wood, roofed with overlapping boards or wooden shingles, and floored with oaken pegs, or else roofed with thatch, which is the most pictur- esque of all—no carved rafters, no plastered or painted ceilings—only varnish on the sup- porting posts. Omitting the Italian style of roofed seats for protection against sun and rain, we note their wall loggias, which most elegantly occupy the ends of broad walks and are often used as orange houses, and are sometimes two stories high, where there isa temptation to command an extensive view. Seats covered by timber arches, or raftered, porch-like doors, half-timbered and garden houses with tiled roofs, and trellised sites for the growth of creeping plants, are very pleasant for reading and smoking, and give an aspect of comfort very desirable, especially when the grounds are extensive; but we agree with those who think that in England unglazed casements are tolerable only dur- ing a certain portion of the year. Stone seats should never be used. Moreover, in nearly all instances a course or two of masonry as a foundation to keep out the damp is indispensable. Another pretty ad- junct of a garden is a pigeon-house, which may be Greek or Gothic, at the builder’s will, and serve as a kiosk as well, the birds being lodged in the lantern; but, if within sight of the dwelling-house, any such edifice should in some degree harmonise with it, particularly when the’ house happens to be what is called a cottage ornee. It has been well observed that this class of structure is about the most difficult to erect that can imagined. Naturally so, because it necessitates a rare amount of taste. In nine cases out of ten these ‘‘ ornamented cottages” are abominably vulgar, puerile, and tricky, verandahed about to excess, barn-like in the roof, Elizabethan in the chimneys, baleonied like a bit of Portland-place, cement here, brick there, with vandyked and scolloped eaves, barge-boards at the ends, and florid decorations, including the proprietor’s coat- of-arms, perhaps, wherever there is a possi- bility of putting them. ‘These are for the most part new, for the cottage-builders of an earlier period, though humbler, were infinitely more chaste in their designs. But this much may be said—that England is the true country