THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



gardener altogether, and get colour by the use of broken brick, white 

 sand, and painted stone. All such work is wrong and degrading to 

 the art of gardening, and in its extreme expressions is ridiculous. 



As I use the word " artistic," in a book on the flower-garden, 

 it may be well to say that as it is used it means right and true 

 in relation to all the conditions of the case, and the necessary limita- 

 tions of our art and all other human arts. A lovely Greek coin, a bit 

 of canvas painted by Corot with the morning light on it, a block 

 of stone hewn into the shape of the dying gladiator, the w^hite moun- 

 tain rocks built into a Parthenon — these are all examples of human 

 art, every one of which can be only fairly judged in due regard to 

 what is possible in the material of each — knowledge which it is part of 

 the artist's essential task to possess. Often a garden may be wrong 

 in various ways, as shown by the conifers spread in front of many a 

 house — ugly in form, not in harmony with our native or best garden 

 vegetation ; mountain trees set out on dry plains and not even hardy ; 

 so that the word inartistic may help us to describe many errors. 

 And again, if we are happy enough to find a garden so true and 

 right in its results as to form a picture that an artist would be 

 charmed to study, we may call it an artistic garden, as a short way 

 of saying that it is about as good as it may be, taking everything into 

 account. 



Landscape Painting and Gardens, — There are few pictures of 

 gardens, because the garden beautiful is rare. Gardens around country 

 houses, instead of forming, as they might, graceful foregrounds 

 to the good landscape views, disfigure all, and drive the artist away 

 in despair. Yet there may be real pictures in gardens ; it is not a 

 mere question of patterns of a very poor sort, but one of light and 

 shade, beauty of form, and colour. In times when gardens were 

 made by men who did not know one tree from another, the matter 

 was settled by the shears — it was a question of green walls only. 

 Now we are beginning to see that there is a wholly different and 

 higher order of beauty to be found in gardens, and we are at the 

 beginning of a period when we may hope to get much more pleasure 

 and instruction out of this art than ever before. 



We have seen in Bond-street a variety of picture exhibitions 

 devoted to gardens, generally of the trifling stippled water-colour 

 order. The painters of these pictures, for the most part ten-minute 

 sketches, have one main idea — that the only garden worth picturing is 

 the shorn one, and pictures of such places are repeated time after 

 time ; a clipped line of Arbor-vitae, with a stuffed peacock stuck by 

 the side of it, is considered good enough for a garden picture. Work 

 of this kind, which is almost mechanical, is so much easier than the 

 drawing of a garden with the elements of varied beauty in it. In 



