I. Fill in the blanks with the correct words.

1. The ___ garden was of great importance to the housewife.

2. In the 16th century British gardeners looked to the ___ for inspiration and learned much from the Dutch and Italians in creating formal, ___ gardens.

3. Unfortunately, many of the formal gardens of this period like Wiltor and Badminton have gone or changed beyond ___ and they are known only from plans and illustrations.

4. Although the ___ garden was essentially English, it owed something to other lands.

5. Great influence had also come from French landscape painters, who depicted ideal landscapes with classical ___ and ___.

6. He (William Kent) started work as ___ to a coach builder in Yorkshire.

7. The lake created at Blenheim is considered to be his ___, and Capability Brown himself became nationally known as the "Landscape Architect of England".

8. The name of Repton had become so much a household word by the end of the 18th century that he has the ___ of being mentioned in one of Jane Austen's novels, "Mansfield Park" (1814).

II. Complete the sentences with the best answer (a, b or c).

1. Covered walks, bushes cut in fantastic shapes, fountains and lawns were all arranged with

a) great care.

b) exclusive taste.

c) trim accuracy.

2. There was influence from China, through the paintings on Chinese porcelain that decorated fashionable

a) country houses.

b) drawing-rooms.

c) living-rooms.

3. The result was striking: new type of garden design was very much like

a) abstract art.

b) fine art.

c) graphic art.

4. Kent's most famous pupil was Lancelot Brown, better known by his nickname

a) "Ability" Brown.

b) "Possibility" Brown.

c) "Capability" Brown.

5. Brown's greatest power was probably his management of water, and he created many "natural"

a) rivers.

b) lakes.

c) canals.

6. In his garden designs he (Repton) retained the wide spaces, but renewed

a) flower-beds and terraces near the house.

b) terraces.

c) topiary.

III. Are the statements true or false? Correct the false statements.

1. All was neatness, with straight walks and flower-beds bordered by tiny hedges of box to form a complicated geometrical pattern known as a "knot".

2. Topiary — trimming hedges into formal shapes —came from Holland and was enthusiastically adopted in gardens like Hampton Court and created a fashion still surviving in many gardens.

3. Britain's greatest contribution to the art of gardening was the 18th-century movement back to nature.

4. Kent came to London to study gardening, and then spent four years in Paris where he became influenced by the new French landscape painting school.

5. Formal flower-beds have been replaced by a lake, temples, ruins and statues to form what he (Kent) called "landscape pictures".

6. These "landscape pictures", however, were designed for the estates of ordinary people, who could afford to pay for such schemes.

7. He began as an independent designer of gardens in 1750, and a few years later a garden designed by Capability Brown was in the forefront of fashion.

8. Repton's tastes were for painting, poetry and music. The idea of becoming a painter gave him an opportunity to use his talent for landscape gardening.

9. More modest gardens sprang up around the smaller country houses of the landowners and the new middle-class people.

10. Although the task of keeping a garden is so essentially individual, j for many people in Britain gardening is the basis of social and competitive relations.