PARK, a space of ground used for public or private recreation, differing from a garden in its spaciousness and the broad, simple, and natural character of its scenery, and from a “wood” in the more scattered arrangement of its trees and greater expanse of its glades and consequently of its landscapes. For the sake of completeness, recreation grounds not properly called parks will be considered under the same title. The grounds of an old English manorial seat are usually divided into two parts, one enclosed within the other and separated from it by some form of fence. The interior part, immediately around the dwelling, is distinguished as the pleasure ground or kept ground, the outer as the park. The park is commonly left open to the public, and frequently the public have certain legal rights in it, especially rights of way. A parish church is sometimes situated within the park. The use of the park as part of a private property is to put the possibilities of disagreeable neighborhood at a distance from the house and the more domestic grounds, to supply a pleasant place of escape from the confinement and orderliness of the more artificial parts of the establishment, and for prolonged and vigorous out-of-door exercise. The kept grounds, being used incidentally to in-door occupations, are designed in close adaptation to the plan of the house, richly decorated, and nicely, often exquisitely, ordered by the constant labor of gardeners. Anciently the kept grounds were designed as a part of the same general architectural plan with the house, and were enclosed and decorated with masses of foliage clipped in imitation of cut and sculptured stone. Their lofty hedges often completely intercepted the view from the house toward the park. A recognition of the fact that the parks were much more beautiful than the kept grounds when thus fashioned, led early in the 16th century to the art of landscape gardening, or, as it is more generally called out of England, landscape architecture. The aim of the new art was, while still keeping the park fenced off, to manage the pleasure grounds in such a way that they would provide a harmonious and appropriate foreground to landscapes extending over the park, and to make such changes in the park itself as would improve the composition of these landscapes.
The scenery of the old parks often has great beauty of a special character, which is the result of the circumstances under which the more ancient and famous of them have been formed. These were originally enclosed many centuries since for keeping deer. In choosing ground for this purpose, rich land having broad
