If there is to be a ‘formal’ garden, it should be next the house, as the house itself is all right-angles and straight lines that harmonize with walls of yew or cypress and kerb-stones of box. Conversely, the ‘wild’ garden should be far away; and the usual notion is that ‘landscape’ gardening covers the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘wild.’ I have a notion of my own that landscape gardening is like sitting between two stools. No doubt, a landscape painter may improve a landscape by omitting things that spoil the view or putting them in where they look right; and a landscape gardener can really cut things down or root them up and plant them somewhere else. He may thereby improve a garden that was naturally wild; but when he plans a ‘landscape’ garden, he usually gives it too much formality for nature and not enough for art.
In looking at landscapes by great painters, such as Claude Lorraine, you sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong, and then it dawns upon you that the hills and dales and rocks and streams defy the laws of Nature. In his _Observations on Modern Gardening_, which first came out in 1770, Whately treats real landscape in the same capricious way; and the question is, how far such licence is allowable. There is an engraving of Turner’s picture of the Temeraire, with some of the mistakes corrected. The sun is still setting in the east, but the tug’s mast is forward of the funnel, not abaft of it, and the Temeraire’s foremast looks taller than her mainmast, as it really would, seen from that point of view. But these corrections spoil the composition, with its series of ascending heights from the tug’s funnel to her mast and the foremast and the mainmast of the Temeraire. Turner understood ships very well, and knew what he was doing. But the Claudes and Whatelys did not understand geology, and blundered in an aimless way.
Whately declares that every ‘landskip’ is composed of ground, wood, water, rocks and buildings. In a garden “every species of architecture may be admitted, from the Grecian down to the Chinese”; but in a wider prospect there should be “no Grecian temples, no Turkish mosques, no Egyptian obelisks or pyramids,” though there may be “the semblance of an ancient British monument,” pp. 119, 120, ed. 1770. As for its construction, “the materials might be brick, or even timber plaistered over, if stone could not easily be procured: whatever they were, the fallacy would not be discernible.” It tempts me to construct a lath-and-plaster Stonehenge here.