198 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. 
apes, chattering with uncontrollable fun, fight mimic battles 
with tropical fruits for ammunition, or gravely assist in 
one another’s toilet. Here again is the gardening of 
the gods—no formal beds, no torturing and trimming of 
Alternantheras, no setting out of geometrical patterns with 
House-leeks. And yet what beauty of form! what incom- 
parable harmony of colours !—a memory the light of which 
the changes and chances of thirty years have not been able 
to extinguish. 
It is good to be able to record the fact that though there 
are still found prophets to bless the so-called architectural 
school of gardening, and even to write books advocating its 
adoption, the professors of these heresies find fewer acolytes 
year by year, while men more and more consult Nature as the 
true fountain-head of the gardener’s craft. As for those 
books and their writers, have they not been pilloried and 
annihilated, and utterly wiped out by the accomplished 
author of the English Flower Garden,—himself a true apostle 
of Nature, and a deadly foe to the intrusions of the stone- 
mason into the garden that he knows how to love. 
And yet I would guard myself against being misunderstood. 
There are, of course, many gardens where the natural 
configuration of the site has made a terrace, or even a 
succession of terraces, a matter of necessity, where, in fact, 
nothing could have been achieved without them. There are 
many such where great beauty has been attained by the 
skilful combination of architecture with plant life. Who 
can deny the merits and distinction of some of the famous 
Roman gardens, or of many of the Scotch and Welsh hillside 
pleasaunces? What I am chiefly concerned to criticise are 
