GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. ir 



It cannot be too clearly remembered that geometrical gardens of 

 a deplorable type are things of our own time, and it is only 

 in our own time the common idea that there is only one way of 

 making a garden was spread. Hence, in all the newer houses we 

 see the stereotyped garden often made in spite of all the needs of the 

 ground, whereas in really old times it was not so. Berkeley is not 

 the same as Sutton, and Sutton is quite different from Haddon. 



Moreover, on top of all this formality of design of our own day 

 were grafted the most formal and inartistic ways of arranging flowers 

 that ever came into the head of man, ways that 

 Patterns of were happily unknown to the Italians or the 

 flowers and makers of the earliest terraced gardens. The 

 carpet-beds^ true Italian g arc Jens were often beautiful with 

 own time. trees in their natural forms, as in the Giusti 



gardens at Verona ; but "bedding out," or marshall- 

 ing the flowers in geometrical patterns, is a thing of our own 

 precious time, and " carpet " gardening is simply a further remove 

 in ugliness. The painted gravel gardens of Nesfield and Barry 

 and other broken-brick gardeners were also an attempt to get rid 

 of the flowers and get rigid patterns instead. Part of the garden 

 architect's scheme was to forbid the growth of plants on walls, as at 

 Shrtibland, where, for many years, there were strict orders that the 

 walls were not to have a flower or a creeper of any kind upon them. 

 As these pattern gardens were made by persons often ignorant of 

 gardening, and if planted in any human way with flowers would all 

 " go to pieces," hence the idea of setting them out as they appeared 

 on the drawing-board, some of the beds not more than a foot in 

 diameter, blue and yellow paints being used where the broken brick 

 and stone did not give the desired colour ! 



Side by side with the adoption in most large and show places of 



the patterned garden, both in design and planting, disappeared 



almost everywhere the old English garden, that 



Loss of old is, one with a variety of form of shrub and flower 



garden ways. and even low trees ; so that now we only find 



this kind of garden here and there in Cornwall, 



Ireland, and Scotland, and on the outskirts of country towns. All 



true plant form was banished because it did not fit into the bad 



carpet pattern ! I am only speaking of what every one must know 



who cares the least about the subject, and of what can be seen 



to-day in all the public gardens round London and Paris. Even 



Kew, with the vast improvement of late years, has not emancipated 



itself from this way of flower-planting, as we see there, in front 



of the palm-house, purple beet marshalled in patterns. But we 



shall never see beautiful flower gardens again until natural ways 



