.8 ' THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



altogether, and get colour by the use of broken brick, white sand, and 

 painted stone. All such work is wrong and degrading to art, and 

 in its extreme expressions is ridiculous. 



As I use the word "artistic" in a book on the flower garden, 



it may be well to say that as it is used it means right and true 



in relation to all the conditions of the case, and 



The word the necessary limitations of our art and all other 



"artistic." human arts. A lovely Greek coin, a bit of canvas 



painted by Corot with the morning light on it, a 



block of stone hewn into the shape of the dying gladiator, the white 



mountain rocks built into a Parthenon these are all examples of 



human art, every one of which can be only fairly judged in due 



regard to what is possible in the material of each. Often a garden 



may be wrong in various ways, as shown by the starveling pines in 



front of many a house ugly in form and not in harmony with our 



native or best garden vegetation ; mountain trees set out on dry 



plains ; so that the word inartistic may help us to describe many 



errors. And again, if we are happy enough to find a garden so true 



and right in its results as to form a picture that an artist would be 



charmed to study, we may call it an artistic garden, as a short way 



of saying that it is about as good as it may be, taking everything into 



account. 



There are few pictures of gardens, because the garden beautiful is 



rare. Gardens around country houses, instead of forming, as they 



might, graceful foregrounds to the good land- 



L ndsc scape views, disfigure all, and drive the artist away 



painting and * n despair. Yet there may be real pictures in 



gardens. gardens ; it is not a mere question of patterns of 



a very poor sort, but one of light and shade, 



beauty of form, and colour. In times when gardens were made 



by men who did not know one tree from another, the matter 



was settled by the shears it was a question of green walls only. 



Now we are beginning to see that there is a wholly different and 



higher order of beauty to be found in gardens, and we are at the 



beginning of a period when we may hope to get much more pleasure 



and instruction out of this art than ever before. 



We have seen in Bond Street a variety of picture exhibitions 

 devoted to gardens, generally of the trifling stippled water-colour 

 order. The painters of these pictures, for the most part ten-minute 

 sketches, have one main idea that the only garden worth picturing is 

 the shorn one, and pictures of such places are repeated time after 

 time ; a clipped line of Arbor-vitae, with a stuffed peacock by 

 the side of it, is considered good enough for a garden picture. Work 

 of this kind, which is almost mechanical, is so much easier than the 



