CHAPTER XXXIII. 



MY FLOWER GARDEN. 



THE Editor of Country Life took a fancy to have a plan of my garden, 

 and I willingly agreed, but now I desire to say a few words about plans 

 and the harm they have done. Plans should be made on the ground to 

 fit the place, and not the place made to suit some plan out of a book. 

 Infinite harm has been done to the good art of gardening by the copy- 

 ing of old plans by designers without sympathy or knowledge of the art 

 itself. Books are full of these plans, and any clerk can copy them 

 and suggest them for all sorts of unfitting situations. In this case I 

 thought of nothing but the ground itself, its relation to the house, 

 and what I wanted to grow in it. 



I am a flower gardener, and not a spreader-about of bad carpets 

 done in reluctant flowers, and when I had a garden of my own to 

 make, I meant it to contain the greatest number of favourite plants 

 in the simplest way. I threw the ground into simple beds, suiting the 

 space for convenience of working and planting, not losing an inch 

 more than was necessary for walks. I did what, so far as we have 

 any evidence to tell us, the Assyrian king and the mediaeval chatelaine 

 did that is to say, I cut my limited garden space into simple beds. 

 No plan of any kind was used nor any suggestion sought from any 

 garden, the question being decided in relation to the space. Any 

 talk about styles in relation to such a thing is absurd. Having 

 made my garden, one day a young lady who had been reading one 

 of those mystifying books about formalities and informalities came 

 in, and, instead of warming her eyes at my Roses and Carnations, 

 said, u Oh, you, too, have a formal garden ! " Just imagine what 

 Nebuchadnezzar or the mediaeval Lady in their small patches of 

 gardens would think of any silly person who made such a remark 

 instead of looking at the flowers ! 



Having cut the space up into the simple plan shown, the next 

 question was to make the walks. For these we used Groydon gravel, 

 but the best we could get here was unsatisfactory. In a real flower 

 garden there must be work to do at midsummer as well as in 

 January, and therefore the gravel walk is a serious hindrance if one 



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