io8 The Landscape Gardening Book 



It seems, sometimes, as if the time would never come when 

 this truth about them would be realized by everybody. Year 

 after year sees the same mistakes made, even on the great 

 estates where large sums have been paid for the services of 

 professionals, presumably skilled and cunning in the craft. Yet 

 with all the money spent the well planned and well planted place 

 remains the exception, so rare as to be startling when one comes 

 upon it; while examples of wrong ways, wrong from their 

 fundamental ideas up, are everywhere. Almost every village 

 and surburban street presents a solid front of garden miscon- 

 ceptions disheartening to behold. 



The two views just cited are of course antagonistic, and 

 everyone can readily see how utterly impossible it is ever to 

 make them anything else. So no time need be wasted in attempt- 

 ing to harmonize them. Instead let us get at once to the business 

 of seeing what reasons there are for adopting one and rejecting 

 the other. 



First of all it is necessary to realize that there are certain 

 special things, grown for show, and for competitive shows, which 

 have no more to do with gardening, considered as a fine art, 

 than chalk has to do with cheese. The biggest Dahlia in the 

 world, winner of all the prizes, would add little or nothing to a 

 garden's beauty if it stood outdoors, among the growing things. 

 The carefully trained and framed chrysanthemum plant, bearing 

 a thousand blossoms, might as well— yea, it might better — be a 

 coreopsis bush, for all the effect it would create in relation to 

 other plants in the border ; and the rose bush, coddled and pruned 

 and petted till it produces a single four-foot-stemmed American 

 beauty, becomes a sorry spectacle, once its solitary flower is 

 plucked. Yet the Dahlia, the chrysanthemum and the rose are 

 universally acclaimed as wonderful horticultural products. 



