ALICE MEYNELL 297 



ceremony. No prosperity except that of summer, no order that is 

 not sweetly made light of while it is carelessly fulfilled, and all 

 access open by way of the sunny air, so that no seeds are denied 

 an anchorage in this port and harbour of the winds. A trim 

 garden that is no longer trim is full of frolic. A trim garden that 

 is still trim has a kind of comeliness as an accessory of architecture. 

 It is, at any rate, a garden and not a landscape. 



For obviously the landscape garden, called abroad the English 

 garden, is the thing most at fault. The English garden is like 

 ' English glass ' — that is, cut glass. Both things are a kind of 

 adulteration. Both things were eagerly admired and imitated on 

 the Continent. 



Landscape gardening, literally, would have been a good thing — 

 the enclosure of the half-wild copse, the arbitrary capture and 

 captivity of a space of wood, meadow, stream, and bank, and the 

 mere harbourage of wild flowers ; it would be the field with all its 

 accidents secure from spoiling. But landscape-gardening that 

 implies^sinuous walks and futile hillocks, and those dullest of all 

 dull things — shrubs — can never have given any genuine joy to man. 



Everyone knows that 'landscape garden.' It has improbable 

 knolls and hollows, closely and accurately fitted with a green 

 sward on which show no daisies. The shrubs grow in groups, 

 very round of shape, and dense to the penetration of the alert 

 and eager glimpses of the sky. Its trees are rarely deciduous, or, 

 if so, are of the fuller and thicker kind ; it has no slender aspens, 

 caught and mingled with the light, and alive with the wind and 

 weather. It has chiefly evergreens of the rarer kinds, having their 

 lower branches so near the ground as to show no stems. ' All 

 the Psalms are good,' says Mrs Pendennis. All trees are good, 

 but those are the least good. 



See, however, how charming is a fruit-garden, or that still 

 simpler fruit-garden, an orchard. All fruit-trees are at play with 

 the light and at peace with the sky. There is nothing in the 

 world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon. The 

 grass beneath them is not cropped of daisies, or fitted and clipped 

 as if by an able dressmaker. Let the garden be a vegetable garden 



