Empire would not
have been at all discreditable, as far as the impress it left on Paris
was concerned.

CHAPTER II

THE EVOLUTION OF FRENCH GARDENS

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.

[Illustration: JARDIN FRANCAIS

JARDIN ANGLAIS]

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, Francois 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