CHAPTER II. 



GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. 



OF all the things made by man for his pleasure a flower garden has 

 the least business to be ugly, barren, or stereotyped, because in it we 

 may have the fairest of the earth's children in a living, ever-changeful 

 state, and not, as in other arts, mere representations of them. And 

 yet we find in nearly every country place, pattern plans, conventional 

 design, and the garden robbed of all life and grace by setting out 

 flowers in geometric ways. A recent writer on garden design tells us 

 that the gardener's knowledge is of no account, and that gardens 



should never have been allowed to fall into the hands of the gardener or out of 

 those of the architect ; that it is an architectural matter, and should have been 

 schemed at the same time and by the same hand as the house itself. 



The chief error he makes is in saying that people, whom he 

 calls " landscapists," destroyed all the formal gardens in England, 

 and that they had their ruthless way until his 

 Formal gardens coming. An extravagant statement, as must be 

 made in our clear to any one who takes the trouble to look 

 own day. into the thing itself, which many of these writers 



will not do or regard the elementary facts of 

 what they write about. Many of the most formal gardens in 

 England have been made within the past century, when this writer 

 says all his ideal gardens were cleared away, e.g., the Crystal Palace, 

 the Royal Horticultural Society's at Kensington, and Witley Court, 

 Castle Howard, Mentmore, Drayton, Crewe Hall. During the 

 whole of that period there was hardly a country seat laid out that 

 was not marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and 

 patterned thing. With Castle Howards, Trenthams, and Chatsworths 

 staring at him, it is ludicrous to see a young architect weeping over 

 their loss. Even if there is no money to waste in gigantic water- 

 squirts, the idea of the terrace is still carried out often in level plains. 

 There are hundreds of such gardens about the country, and the 

 ugliest gardens ever made in England have been made in Victorian 

 days. 



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