THE USE OF GARDENS 



opportunities and how they can be turned properly to account. 

 The garden can truly be described as " an employment and a 

 possession, for which no man is too high or too low," and it can be 

 treated in accordance with the needs and the tastes of its possessor 

 without in any way disregarding nature's precepts. To make it 

 equally "the pleasure of the greatest and the ease of the meanest" 

 all that is necessary is to understand how the material available 

 should be used. The lordly pleasure-ground can be made a wonder 

 and delight by drawing lavishly on nature's store for the working 

 out of a costly and complex decorative scheme ; but the owner of a 

 modest villa, or even the cottager with his little plot, can produce, 

 with the means at his disposal, effects which are, proportionately, as 

 interesting, and as important artistically. The charm of the garden 

 is not a monopoly of the rich man for it is not to be secured merely 

 by the expenditure of money ; it comes really from the exercise of 

 taste and correct judgment and from that aesthetic perception which 

 seizes immediately upon what is worthiest of consideration, and 

 utilises it with discretion. 



Indeed, there is some danger that the garden of the costly and 

 ambitious type may by its very elaboration become too artificial and 

 too little in touch with nature to inspire the proper sentiment. It 

 can easily lose its charm if it is made a show place for the display of 

 expensive eccentricities, and if it offers only the suggestion that it is 

 intended to advertise the wealth of its possessor. A garden so 

 maltreated is immodest and vulgarly demonstrative ; it ceases to be 

 a place of rest and quiet and excites instead feelings of discontent. 

 Its details are as jarring as its general effect is irritating, and in its 

 failure to fulfil its true purpose it outrages all nature's canons and 

 travesties cruelly her better characteristics. But, worst of all, it 

 lacks that sense of fitness which is essential in every rightly 

 imagined aesthetic scheme and stands proclaimed as a thing mis- 

 conceived and mishandled, illegitimate in intention and warped 

 in development. 



Far more satisfaction can be obtained from some simpler piece 

 of arrangement in which earnest nature study and serious artistic 

 imagining have gone hand in hand, in which the desire to make 

 a show has been kept in check by sincere regard for the aesthetic 

 proprieties. This simpler arrangement may well have cost the 

 designer infinitely greater trouble, for deliberate simplicity is much 

 more difficult to obtain than showy effectiveness, but it implies a 

 higher standard of artistic practice and greater intelligence. The 

 art which does not assert itself but allows the perfection of its 



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