iS ' THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



The architect writer turns on the waterworks as his chief solace : 



But of all the fascinating sources of effect in garden-making the most 

 fascinating are waterworks. An expensive luxury as a rule, but they well repay 

 the expense. 



Well, there is some evidence of the sort of design these afford ; 



some instances terrible in their ugliness (one hideous at Bayreuth). 



And with all the care that a rich State may take 



Waterworks of them, can we say that the effect at Versailles is 



garden design, artistic or delightful? Water tumbling into the 



blazing streets of Roman cities and nobly designed 



fountains supplying the people with water was right ; but in our cool 



land artificial fountains are very different in effect, and often hideous 



extravagance. Of their ugliness there is evidence in nearly every city 



in Europe, including our own Trafalgar Square, and that fine work at 



the head of the Serpentine. We have also our Crystal Palace and 



Chatsworth, designed as they might be by a theatrical super who 



had suddenly inherited a millionaire's fortune. So far as our 



island countries go, nothing asks for more care and modest art 



than the introduction into the garden or home landscape of 



artificial water. Happily our countries are rich in the charms of 



natural water too often neglected in its planting. 



Among the great peoples of old, so far as known to our human 

 story, was one supreme in art, from buildings chiselled as delicately 

 as the petals of the wild rose, to the smallest 

 Hollow talk of coins in their pockets, and bits of baked clay in 

 the day about their graves, and this is clear to all men from 

 art. what remains of their work gathered from the 



mud and dust of ages. And from that time of 

 deathless beauty in art comes the voice of one who saw this lovely 

 art in its fulness : The greatest and fairest things are done by 

 Nature and the lesser by Art (Plato). There is not a garden in 

 Britain, free from convention and carpet gardening, from the 

 cottage gardens nestling beneath the Surrey hills to those fair and 

 varied gardens in Cornwall, which does not tell the same story to 

 all who have eyes to see and hearts to care for the thing itself, 

 and not merely for incoherent talk about it. The only sad thing 

 is that such words must be said again and again ; but we live in 

 a time of much printed fog about artistic things the " New Art " 

 and the " New Esthetic " ; " Evolution," which explains how every- 

 thing comes from nothing and goes back again to worse than 

 nothing ; the sliding bog of " realism and idealism " in which the 

 phrase-monger may dance around and say the same false thing ten 

 times over ; and, last and least of all among these imbecilities, the 



