24 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN 



picturesque, with rocks, cascades, and undulations of the ground, but 

 the simple dignity of trees and the charm of turf. 



Elaborate terraced gardens in the wrong place often prevent the 

 formation of beautiful lawns, though a good lawn is the happiest thing 

 in a garden. For many years past there has been so much cutting 

 up, geometry and stonework, that it is rare to find a good lawn, and 

 many a site so cut up would be vastly improved if changed into a 

 large, nobly fringed lawn. A poorly built house with a fine open 

 lawn has often a better effect than a fine one with a rectilineal 

 garden and terraces in front of it, though there are cases where walls 

 would be the way to a good result. 



A style of garden " design " that for a long time has had an 

 injurious effect on many places is the " railway embankment " phase 

 of landscape gardening, in which we see a series of sharply graded 

 grass slopes like well-smoothed railway embankments. In this 

 variety we often find several sharp banks, one below the other, 

 without a protecting wall at the top, and obtruding their sharp 

 green angles on various points of view, and this perhaps in the 

 face of a beautiful landscape. 



A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful 

 scene of the cultivated earth, all the more so if there be an artistic 

 garden. The union between the house beautiful and the ground 

 near it — a happy marriage it should be — is worthy of more thought 

 than it has had in the past, and the best way of effecting that 

 union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities 

 grow larger and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from 

 them. We have never yet got from the garden and the home 

 landscape half the beauty which we might get by abolishing the 

 patterns which disfigure so many gardens. Formality is often 

 essential to the plan of a garden but never to the arrangement of 

 its flowers or shrubs, and to array these in rigid lines, circles, or 

 patterns can only be ugly wherever it may be. 



After we have settled the essential approaches and levels around 

 a house, the natural form or lines of the earth itself are in nearly all 

 cases the best to follow, and it is often well to face any labour to get the 

 ground back into its natural grade where it is disfigured by ugly or 

 needless banks, lines, or angles. In the true Italian garden on the 

 hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth, or " terrace it," 

 because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or stand at ease 

 upon it, and in such ground the formal is right, as the lawn is in 

 a garden in the Thames valley. But the lawn is the heart of the 

 true English garden, and as essential to it as the terrace to the gardens 

 on the steep hills, and English lawns have been too often destroyed 

 for plans ruinous both to the garden and the home landscape. Some- 



