Loss of harmony in Indian gardens
We may, however, place to the credit of the English landscape style the broad treatment of parks, the skilful management of large sheets of water, and the effective grouping of trees; but these were more than counterbalanced by the destruction of the garden near the house, till all that was ultimately left of the once charming walled pleasance had shrunk into an ugly kitchen garden, unconnected with the house, hiding its necessarily 'formal' walls in a neighbouring wood, where hideous greenhouses and untidy, odd potting sheds replaced the stately orangery and the corner garden towers of former days. Such was the garden-craft we brought to India when the fine old Anglo-Indian houses of Madras and Calcutta were in process of building !
For whatever we may think of their gardens, the eighteenth-century classical buildings in India were good of their kind and adapted to the climate. But as the English houses grew more formal and severely classical, the gardens, as if in protest, lost all form, and the fundamental principle of the relation between house and garden was completely lost sight of-the principle till then so strictly adhered to throughout all the periods of English art. Such was the havoc which this fashion wrought that even to-day in England we have not altogether recovered in our gardens this lost sense of harmony.
