Land for Gardens: The Garden of Euphues

However, save to the botanical gardeners, much of this knowledge was soon to be valueless, for in the new type of garden very little of it would be required. It has been said that there is no such thing as a typical Dutch garden, as it has also been said that there is no typically Spanish garden and no typically German and Scandinavian gardens. In the sense that none of these nations evolved a national garden so easily distinguished in plan as those of Italy in the sixteenth, France in the seventeenth and England in the eighteenth centuries, this is true; but it is impossible for a virile community, as all these were, to accept external influences without giving them a local twist or national flavour. Sometimes the hybrid, as in the case of French and English gardens, develops a difference that is fundamental, but more often there are differences in detail, in emphasis, or in spirit. These small differences are not to be dismissed as merely superficial. The individual character of a garden as of any other work of art can be as dependent upon surface qualities as upon underlying design. The physical peculiarity of Holland is so great that the influence of political factors, which might also have been dramatic, can very nearly be ignored. In the first place the flatness of the land obviously precludes any general development of terracing. Where there are no considerable differences in level it is an effort to provide water fountains and cascades. The possibility of lavish water works without auxiliary power as at the Villa d'Este never occurred in Holland and Zeeland, nor even in Brabant or Flanders. The land is for the most part alluvial; stone is therefore not to be had locally in great quantities, and the Roman architectural garden would have been extravagantly costly to create. The land was agriculturally rich, thickly populated and intensively cultivated; gardens therefore were limited in size. Most positive influence of all was the frequency of drainage canals. The medieval garden was rectilinear because it grew up amongst the ruins of buildings; but straight lines and right-angles are as inexorably imposed by canals as they are by wall decor.