PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 



THIS book is the muster of various once forlorn hopes and 

 skirmishing parties now united with better arms and larger aims, 

 and its beginnings may have an interest for others. I came to 

 London just when the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at 

 Kensington was being laid out, a series of elaborate patterns 

 set at different levels, and the Crystal Palace, in its glory, was 

 described by the Press of the day to be the most wonderful 

 instance of modern gardening water-temples, water-paths, vast 

 stone basins and all the theatrical gardening of Versailles re- 

 produced in Surrey. 



There was little or no reason admitted into garden design : 

 the same poor imitation of the Italian garden being set down in 

 all sorts of positions. If the place did not suit the style, the 

 ground had to be bolstered up in some way so that the plan 

 might be carried out a costly way to get an often ridiculous 

 result. The great writers of the past had laughed the carpenter's 

 rule out of the parks of England, and pictures arose where they 

 were once impossible ; but the ugliness of the garden about the 

 house was assumed to be an essential part of the thing itself, 

 removing that for ever from the sympathies of artistic people. 



The flower garden planting was made up of a few kinds of 

 flowers which people were proud to put out in thousands and tens 

 of thousands, and with these, patterns, more or less elaborate, were 

 carried out in every garden save the very poorest cottage garden. 

 It was not easy to get away from all this false and hideous " art/' 

 but I was then in the Botanic Gardens, Regent's Park, where there 

 was at that time a small garden of British plants, which had to be 

 kept up, and this led me into the varied country round London, 

 from the orchid-flecked meadows of Bucks to the tumbled down 

 undercliffs on the Essex coast, untroubled by the plough ; and so 

 I began to get an idea (which should be taught to every boy at 

 school) that there was (for gardens even) much beauty in our 

 native flowers and trees, and then came the thought that if there 

 was so much in our own island flora, what might we not look for 



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