120 The Landscape Gardening Book 



will not be crowded out, even though the better ideas are re- 

 quired. They crop up continually, like noxious weeds — so up 

 by the roots let us drag them, and start anew. 



First, here is the flower bed habit. This is surely the greatest 

 abomination of them all! It is going to die hard, even with 

 those who truly wish to kill it. Many there are, alas ! who will 

 not wish to; for its star and its crescent, its circle and its triangle, 

 have so impressed themselves upon its victims that they cannot 

 see a stretch of smooth and velvet turf without an instant tempta- 

 tion to fall upon it, and carve some one of these mystic symbols 

 from its heart. 



But lest I seem imduly prejudiced, let me hasten to say that 

 there are places for flower beds — a few places — and that, in 

 their place, I am not objecting to them in the least. True, I 

 have never been able to see any beauty in the gimcrackery which 

 shapes them on the elaborate lines that good, wise, old Bacon 

 dismissed contemptuously with, "They be but toys; you may 

 see as good sights many times in tarts ' ' — but they need not be 

 shaped on such lines. He spoke of the parterre filled with 

 colored sands instead of flowers, to be sure — ^but the fancy beds 

 of to-day, filled with exotic and perishable stuff, are the direct 

 descendants of these sanded parterres; "knots or figures with 

 divers-coloured earths. 



A flower bed brings us again to the flowers' likeness to jewels; 

 for properly placed, a bed occupies a position in the garden corre- 

 sponding to the position of a properly used jeweled pin or buckle 

 on a robe. (I say "properly used'" to evade the dictum of 

 fashion which is sometimes known to strain a point for the sake 

 of adding a Uttle extra trimming.) A study of the costume of 

 any well clad race will show at once that pins clasp two portions 

 of a garment together, or hold the folds of some drapery in 



