THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



The term landscape planting is often scoffed at by these writers, 



yet it is a good one with a clear meaning, which is the grouping and 



growth of trees in natural forms as opposed to 



Landscape the universal aligning, clipping, and shearing of 



gardening. the Dutch ; the natural incidence of light and 



shade and breadth as the true guide in all artistic 



planting. The term landscape gardening is a true and, in the fullest 



sense, a good English one, with a clear and even beautiful meaning, 



namely, the study of the forms of the earth, and frank acceptance 



of them as the best of all for purposes of beauty or use of planter 



or gardener, save where the surface is so steep that one must alter 



it to work upon it. 



We accept the varied slopes of the river bank and the path of the 

 river as not only better than those of a Dutch canal, but a hundred 

 times better ; and not only for their beauty, but for the story they tell 

 of the earth herself in ages past. We gratefully take the lessons of 

 Nature in her most beautiful aspects of vegetation as to breadth, 

 airy spaces, massing and grouping of the woods that fringe the 

 valleys or garland the mountain rocks as better beyond all that 

 words can express than anything men can invent or ever have 

 invented. 



We love and prefer the divinely-settled form of the tree or shrub 

 or flower beyond any possible expression of man's misguided efforts 

 with shears, such as we see illustrated in old Dutch books where 

 every living thing is clipped to conform to an idea of " design " that 

 arose in the minds of men to whom all trees were green things to be 

 cut into ugly walls. We repudiate as false and ridiculous the common 

 idea of the pattern-monger's book, that these aspirations of ours are 

 in any way " styles," the inventions of certain men, because we know 

 that they are based on eternal truths of Nature, free as the clouds to 

 any one who climbs the hills and has eyes to see. 



The fact that ignorant men who have never had the chance of 



learning these lessons, make pudding-like clumps in a vain attempt 



to diversify the surface of the ground, and other 



The true test foolish things, does not in the least turn us aside 



of a flower from following the true and only ways to get the 



garden. best expression possible of beauty from any given 



morsel of the earth's surface we have to plant. 



We sympathise with the landscape-painter's work as reflecting for 



us, though often in a faint degree, the wondrously varied beauty of 



the earth, and in the case of the great master-painters full of truth 



and beauty. We hold that the only true test of our efforts in 



planting or gardening is the picture. Do we frighten the artist 



away, or do we bring him to see a garden so free from ugly patterns 



