212 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. 
Like a cavernous Madame Malbrook! Grottos have gone 
out of fashion now ; as Dr. Johnson pointed out, they did not 
suit the climate; and then they were so manifestly incom- 
plete: what is a spelunca without a great clumsy Polyphemus 
ogling his Galatea with his one saucer-eye ? 
Of carpet gardening—a disgrace which has sat heavily upon 
us these many years—there is no need to say much; it 
avails not to flog a dead horse, and this, if not dead, is at any 
rate dying; as Bacon said of the fashion consequent upon it, of 
tricking out patterns in coloured earths, sands, or pebbles, 
“You may see as good sights, many times, in tarts.” 
The truth is that in every good garden there is a poetical 
or spiritual beauty with which these crude and flaunting 
artifices are out of tune; the air which breathed o’er Eden still 
in some mystic sense pervades our groves. “God planted the 
2 
first garden ;” and if man was formed in His image, may we 
not believe that certain more favoured spots still reflect the 
idea of that first Divine Garden? To catch the spirit of these 
is the supreme art of the gardener, and leads him to the 
realisation of the next proposition of the text, “the purest of 
human pleasures.” 
I look upon gardening as one of the fine arts, and, rightly 
understood, not one of the least difficult. The painter or the 
sculptor makes his effects at once, and obliterates, or models 
and remodels, until he has attained that at which he is 
aiming. But the gardener has to consider not what his work 
is now, but what it will grow into ten, twenty, fifty years 
hence. He has to take into account not the present aspect 
of his materials, but what are their capabilities in the future 
and their relative powers of development. If he has a 
