CHAPTER II 



SEATS 



THE seat is the earliest form of garden furniture, and 

 between the felled tree-stump, which served our ancestors 

 as a convenient resting-place, and the elaborate structures 

 which are to be seen in modern gardens, there are a 

 great variety of styles good, bad, and indifferent. Not- 

 withstanding the progress which has been made in the 

 decorative arts of this country during the last decade, 

 the furniture intended for our gardens still retains its 

 reputation for being hopelessly crude and inartistic. 

 Especially so is this the case with the class which we are 

 now considering, and of which William Robinson has 

 said, " It is rare to see a garden seat that is not an eye- 

 sore." Why this should be so is somewhat difficult to 

 understand, for neither in design nor construction is 

 there any great difficulty to overcome. The fact that a 

 large proportion of garden-seats are home-made proves 

 that the fault must occur in the style adopted, rather than 

 in the matter of workmanship. One of the indirect 

 reasons for comments such as the above, is probably due 

 to a certain mock-professionalism, which seems to be an 

 easily acquired attribute of some of our latter-day 

 amateurs. They do not care for much beauty in the 

 garden as a whole, but are ambitious to remember the 

 Latin names of all their plants, the ancestors of each, and 

 as many sub-varieties as possible. Their beds are turned 

 into nursery plots, the herbaceous flowers in the border 



