THE USE OF GARDENS 



its imperfections or confer upon it any degree of artistic interest. 

 Artificial it is in its beginning and artificial it remains to the end, 

 incapable of giving pleasure to the man of taste and irritating as a 

 monument of missed opportunities. 



The vice of artificiality is one to which the gardener is occasionally 

 rather too apt to succumb. It appears frequently in the strange 

 preference which men have for rare and unusual plants that are 

 more than a little out of place in the normal garden ; and it is 

 shown, too, in an unaccountable dislike of the more familiar flowers 

 and trees. Underlying both this preference and this dislike is 

 evidently an idea that there is some sort of virtue in novelty for 

 novelty's sake, and that the specimen tree grown into a mechanical 

 regularity of shape, or the flower which is the latest product of 

 scientific cultivation, must necessarily be more interesting, because 

 they are unusual, than those which have delighted many generations 

 of nature lovers. And it may be that in some minds the inclination 

 towards artificiality is encouraged by the vulgar belief that the plant 

 which is of some practical utility is unsuited for any decorative 

 purposes no matter how beautiful it may be in itself. 

 This last point is well dealt with by Mr. Reginald Blomfield in his 

 book, "The Formal Garden in England" : "The landscape gardener 

 attempts to establish a sort of hierarchy of nature, based upon much 

 the same principle as that which distinguishes a gentleman by his 

 incapacity to do any useful work. Directly it is proved that a plant 

 or a tree is good for food, it is expelled from the flower garden 

 without any regard to its intrinsic beauty. The hazel-hedge has 

 gone, and the apple-tree has long been banished from the flowers. 

 Of all the trees an apple-tree in full bloom, or ripe in autumn, is 

 perhaps the loveliest. Trained as an espalier it makes a beautiful 

 hedge, and set out as in an orchard it lets the sun play through its 

 leaves and chequer with gold the green velvet of the grass in a way 

 that no other tree will quite allow. Nothing can be more beautiful 

 than some of the walks under the apple-trees in the gardens at 

 Penshurst. Yet the landscape gardener would shudder at the idea 

 of planting a grove or hedge of apple-trees in his garden. Instead 

 of this he will give you a conifer or a monkey-puzzle, though the 

 guelder-rose grows wild in the meadow and the spindle-tree in the 

 wood, and the rowan, the elder, and the white-thorn ; and the wild 

 cherry in autumn fires the woodland with its crimson and gold. 

 Everyone admires these as a matter of proper sensibility to nature ; 

 but it does not seem to occur to people that they would grow with 

 as little difficulty in a garden, at the very smallest expense." 

 viii 



