Equally stupid is the assumption, throughout the book, that the people the authors are pleased to term "landscapists" flop their houses down in the Grass, and never use low walls for dividing lines, nor terraces where necessary, never use walls for shelter or privacy, have no "order" or "balance," and presumably allow the Nettles to look in at the windows, and the cattle to have a fine time with the Carnations! [Illustration: Tailpiece] NO GRASS IN LANDSCAPE GARDENING! The following glaring piece of injustice is due to want of the most elementary consideration of garden design:-- Grass-work as an artistic quantity can hardly be said to exist in landscape gardening. It is there considered simply as so much background to be broken up with shrubs and Pampas Grass and irregular beds (p. 135). The opposite of this is the fact. Grass-work as an "artistic quantity" did not exist in anything like the same degree before landscape gardening. One of the faults of the formal style of gardening still seen in France and Austria is that there is little or no Grass. Compare the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the Parc Monceau, or the many other gardens about Paris in which Grass is an "artistic quantity." One of the most effective reasons indeed for adopting the English landscape garden was that it gave people some fresh and open Grass, often with picturesque surroundings, and, nowadays, one can hardly travel on the continent and not see some pleasant results of this. In England, the landscape gardeners and writers have almost destroyed every trace of the stiff old formal gardens, and we cannot judge the ill effects of the builder's garden so easily as in France. As a rule, the want of rest and freshness in tropical and sub-tropical gardens is due to the absence of those broad and airy breadths of greensward which, in gardens at least, are largely due to landscape gardening. Think of Warwick without its turf and glorious untrimmed Cedars! [Illustration: _Goodwood. Example of large English places in which the grass sweeps up to the house_] Consider the difference between a picturesque landscape like the Emperor of Austria's stately garden at Laxenberg, near Vienna, and the gardens in the same city formed of miserable clipped trees in lines! Grass as an "artistic quantity" is finely visible at Laxenberg; in the old clipped gardens gravel and distorted trees are the only things seen in quantity--we cannot call it "artistic."