VIII APOLOGIA PRO BAMBUSIS MEIS 213 
background ready made to his hand he is lucky, but if he has 
to make it he has to do so with trees which are mostly far 
slower of growth than the more immediately effective plants 
which it is their office to set off. He has to balance questions 
of soil, light, moisture. All this involves not only the poetic 
sense, but also ereat and patiently-acquired knowledge. He 
has no Aladdin’s lamp wherewith to bid trees spring from the 
earth and form a sheltering background, yet background is 
the soul of all gardening, rarely, alas! seen at its best by him 
who has devised it. If the background be unfitting all the 
work is thrown away. Colour, form, light and_ shade, 
grouping, all have to be studied in the composition of one of 
those living pictures which the gardener paints with living 
materials. 
In these days his choice of subjects is varied indeed, for 
there is scarcely a portion of the globe from which he cannot 
borrow some landscape with the aid of the wealth of plants 
that the last half century has given us. Are all these chances 
and opportunities to be thrown away? Are the lessons that 
have been learnt to be a vain thing? It seems to me to be 
rank folly that we should fetter ourselves by rejecting all the 
beauties of form as being incongruous, when no one dreams of 
excluding those of colour. No one ever repudiates a beautiful 
flower because it is an exotic ; it is inconsistent, then, to refuse 
admission to a lovely tree. In nature it is to form, far more 
than to colour, that the fairest pictures owe their charm. You 
may have to hunt for a flower, but the grace of a Palm or a 
Bamboo springs into notice of itself. 
So far as our present knowledge goes, with the single 
exception of Fortune’s Chamerops, the hardy Bamboos are the 
