THE WATER-GARDEN 259 
CHAPTER XIII 
Che Water-Garden 
Apvice to those about to build a Water-garden—DON’T. 
Not that the Water-garden is not a joy and a glory; but 
that it is cruelly hard to keep in order and control unless 
you are master of millions and of broad ample acres of 
pool and pond. Water, like fire, is a good servant, 
perhaps, but is painfully liable to develop into a master. 
As Webster's Flaminio says of women, water, to the 
gardener, ‘is either a god or a wolf. How many little 
ponds are unguardedly built, only to become mere basins 
of slime and duckweed? How many larger pools are 
made, only to fill with Chara, Potamogeton, and the other 
noxious growths that make its depths a clogged, waving 
forest of dull brown vendure? The fact is, a pool—not 
an easy thing to build and set going—is of all things in 
the garden the hardest of all to keep in decent order. 
Some of its choice inmates devour and despoil the smaller 
ones ; water-weeds increase and multiply at a prodigious 
rate; dead leaves drift thick upon it in autumn, slime 
and green horrors make a film across it in summer. 
Contrast with this grim picture the water-garden as it 
glisters before the sanguine eye of him who contemplates 
possessing one—that crystal expanse, starred with goblets 
of Nymphaea, those neat yet luxuriant shores aglow 
with every glorious plant of the marsh. But the ideal 
water- garden I need not draw from my own words. 
‘The ideal water-garden has been described, once and for 
