Geometric Shape Gardens : Garden Design Style

They tried a little of every-thing, struggling desperately, with their gardens of this and that and the other land, and of this and that and the other species of plant, to grasp and contain and hold to themselves a world that had expanded beyond their capacity to control it. Like children upon whom a too-indulgent parent had poured out too many toys, they snatched at everything and got the true joy of none of it. There was little by now of the unschooled appetite of the eighteenth-century eclectics thoroughly enjoying their Grecian and Gothick and Chinese. The creators of these gardens no longer said, `Isn't this fun?' but rather, `Where does salvation lie?' There were now no principles. The clearly indicated principles which one could either accept or rebel against had disintegrated and there was no firm ground for prejudice or conviction. For the greater part of the century a sort of bastard gardenesque dominated the great gardens, with a strange tendency for the flower garden to be laid out in geometric shapes and for the tree and shrub garden to be laid out on `natural' principles. But gradually other features became evident until, as the years pass, it is possible to discern that what was taking place, very slowly, very uncertainly, was an attempt by the geometric garden and the natural garden to absorb the new material and together to produce a new synthesis. Just as Victorian England out of the great inheritance of its past and the hitherto unexperienced fact of its industrial present was trying to do the same thing.