THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



wrong positions in the shape of green banks often one above the 

 other, as if they were an artistic treat. There are hundreds of such 

 gardens about the country, and the ugliest and most formally set out 

 and planted gardens ever made in England have been made in Vic- 

 torian days when, we are told by writers who do not look into the 

 facts of the thing itself, all these things were lost. 



It cannot be too clearly remembered that " formal " gardens of the 

 most deplorable type are things of our own time, and it is only in our 

 own time the common idea that there is only one way of making a 

 garden was spread. Hence, in all the newer houses we see the stereo- 

 typed garden often made in spite of all the needs of the ground, 

 whereas in really old times it was not so. Berkeley is not the same 

 as Sutton, and Sutton is quite different from Haddon. 



Moreover, on top of all this formality of design of our own day 



were grafted the most formal and inartistic ways of arranging flowers 



that ever came into the head of man, ways that 



Patterns of ^^g^g happily unknown to the Italians or the 



4. 1. J makers of the earliest terraced gardens. The 



carpet-beds , ,. , r . ^ , . , 



things of our ^^"^ Italian gardens were often beautiful with 

 own time. trees in their natural forms, as in the Giusti gar- 



dens at Verona ; but bedding out, or marshalling 

 the flowers in stiff lines and geometrical patterns, is entirely a thing 

 of our own precious time, and "carpet" gardening is simply a 

 further remove in ugliness. The painted gravel gardens of Nesfield 

 and Barry and other broken-brick gardeners were also an attempt to 

 get rid of the flowers and get rigid formality instead, as in the Horti- 

 cultural Society's garden at South Kensington. Part of the garden 

 architect's scheme was to forbid the growth of plants on walls, as at 

 Shrubland, where, for many years, there were strict orders that the 

 walls vv^ere not to have a flower or a creeper of any kind upon them. 

 As these pattern gardens were made by persons often ignorant of 

 gardening, and if planted in any human way with flowers would all 

 " go to pieces," hence the idea of setting them out as they appeared 

 on the drawing-board, some of the beds not more than a foot in 

 diameter, blue and yellow paints being used where the broken brick 

 and stone did not give the desired colour ! 



Side by side with the adoption in most large and show places of 



the patterned garden, both in design and planting, disappeared 



almost everywhere the old English garden, that 



Loss of old is, one with a variety of form of shrub and flower 



garden ways. and even low trees ; so that now we only find 



this kind of garden here and there in Cornwall, 



Ireland, and Scotland, and on the outskirts of country towns. All 



true plant form was banished because it did not fit into the bad 



