I welcomed these enquiries, partly because they came as a
relief from questions regarding Gibraltar or the Alto Adige, and partly because the subject is one which has always interested me and around which I have woven a pet theory. Originally, I explained, garden-design was determined by the problem of irrigation. Thus when Amenophis III laid out his garden, when Queen Hatshepsut planted the scented shrubs which she imported from Somaliland, it was found necessary to place the irrigation-channels at right angles to each other and the beds were ordained in rectilinear pat- terns. When the art of garden design passed from Alexandria to Rome, the chess-board pattern necessitated by the aridity of the first human gardens became a fixed convention. Pliny, for instance, was as enthusiastic a gardener as John Evelyn, and the water supply at Laurentinum was abundant ; yet it never occurred to Pliny that it would be possible, or even fitting, to draw his topiary hedges in anything but the straightest of lines, and his little flower-beds (redolent though they were with the oriental hyacinth and the Milesian rose) were sparse.and square. It was this Roman tradition which passed to Western Europe and thus to England, where it remained rigid for some 1,70o years.
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