CHAPTER XXIV. 



SIMPLER FLOWER GARDEN PLANS AND THE RELATION OF 

 THE FLOWER GARDEN TO THE HOUSE. 



A GREAT waste is owing to frivolous and thoughtless " design " 

 as to plan and shapes of the beds in the flower garden. What a 

 vision opens out to any one who considers the design of the flower 

 garden when he thinks of the curiosities and vexations in the forms 

 of beds in almost every land where a flower garden exists ! The 

 gardener is the heir to his great misfortune of much useless 

 complexity and frivolous design, born of applying conventional de- 

 signs to the ground. These designs come to us from a remote epoch, 

 and the designing of gardens being from very early times in the hands 

 of the decorative "artist," the garden was subjected to their will, and 

 in our own days we even see gardens laid without the slightest 

 relation to garden use, difficult to plant, and costly to form and to 

 keep in order. At South Kensington the elaborate tracery of sand 

 and gravel was attractive to some when first set out, but it soon 

 turned to dust and ashes. It was, indeed, to a great extent formed 

 of broken brickdust, in a vain attempt to get rid of the gardener 

 and his flowers. The colours were supplied from the building 

 sheds, where boys were seen pounding up bricks and slates, and 

 beds were made of silver sand, so that no gardener could dis- 

 figure them. The Box edgings of beds a foot wide or smaller soon 

 got out of order, and after a few years the whole thing was painful to 

 see, while good gardeners were wasting precious time trying to plant 

 paltry beds in almost every frivolous device known to the art of 

 conventional design. 



Even where such extravagances were never attempted we see 



the evil of the same order of ideas, and in many gardens the idea of 



adapting the beds to the ground never occurs to 



Book plans. the designer, but a design has been taken out of 

 some old book. If the ground does not suit 

 the plan, so much the worse for the ground and all who have to 

 work on it. From the results of this style of forming beds the 

 cottage gardens escaped, the space being small and the cottage 

 gardener content with the paths about his door. To some people 



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