FOREWORDS TO NEW EDITION. 



This book is the muster of various once forlorn hopes and 

 skirmishing parties now united with better arms and larger aims, 

 and its beginnings may have an interest for others. I came to 

 London just when the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at 

 Kensington was being laid out, a series of elaborate patterns set at 

 different levels, and the Crystal Palace, in its glory, was described 

 by the Press of the day to be the most wonderful instance of 

 modern gardening — water-temples, water-paths, vast stone basins and 

 all the theatrical gardening of Versailles reproduced in Surre}-. 



There was little or no reason admitted into garden design : 

 the same poor imitation of the Italian garden being set down in 

 all sorts of positions. If the place did not suit the style, the ground 

 had to be bolstered up in some way so that the plan might be carried 

 out — a costly way to get an often ridiculous result. The great 

 writers of the past had laughed the carpenter's rule out of the 

 parks of England, and pictures arose where they were once impos- 

 sible ; but the ugliness of the garden about the house was assumed 

 to be an essential part of the thing itself, removing that for ever 

 from the sympathies of artistic people. 



The flower garden planting was made up of a few kinds of 

 flowers which people were proud to put out in thousands and tens 

 of thousands, and with these, patterns, more or less elaborate, were 

 carried out in every garden save the very poorest cottage garden. 

 It was not easy to get away from all this false and hideous " art," 

 but I was then in the Botanic Gardens, Regent's Park, where there 

 was at that time a small garden of British plants, which had to be 

 kept up, and this led me into the varied country round London, 

 from the orchid-flecked meadows of Bucks to the tumbled down 

 undercliffs on the Essex coast, untroubled by the plough ; and so I 



