THE USE OF GARDENS 



obtrusion of the utilitarian point of view can be staved off ; and 

 so long as the best of the existing gardens are preserved the standard 

 of achievement in this form of art should not be impossible to 

 maintain. Happily, there are still many people who are sincerely 

 striving to keep intact the beauties of existing gardens or are busy 

 with the creation of new ones, and there are plenty of designers 

 who combine well-balanced originality with thorough respect for 

 sound tradition. Gardening, one of the oldest of the arts, is not 

 yet out of fashion, and unless some drastic change is made in the 

 social conditions which prevail in this country, or we undergo 

 some extraordinary lapse from artistic sanity, it promises to flourish 

 amongst us in the future as sturdily as it has in the past. 

 For the benefit of the severely practical man in whose narrow mind 

 there is no room for any aesthetic fancies, and to whom all work 

 which does not bring in an immediate monetary return seems only 

 wasted labour, it may be as well to point out that the making 

 and maintaining of gardens is an industry of no little importance. 

 Of course, the pleasure ground is not a profit-earning concern, a 

 paying investment giving results in hard cash ; yet the money 

 spent upon it produces a dividend well worth having. This 

 dividend is, no doubt, of too abstract a kind to satisfy the com- 

 mercial person whose soul can never rise above a balance sheet, 

 but to the possessors of a higher order of intelligence and less 

 rudimentary reasoning powers money will seem well invested 

 when from it comes the fullest gratification of the higher aesthetic 

 instincts and a vast addition to the joy of life when it adds some- 

 thing of immense value to the store of educational advantages by 

 which the nation is enabled to hold its own in the never-ceasing 

 competition with other civilised peoples. 



But though such subtleties are doubtless beyond the comprehension 

 of the man who prides himself on what he calls his shrewd 

 common-sense, and who understands nothing but the hard facts of 

 commercialism, he would hardly be able to deny that gardening, 

 by the employment it provides for a large number of workers, and 

 by the assistance it gives to many trades directly and indirectly 

 connected with it, has a place of considerable significance among 

 commercial activities. The constant attention of a busy staff of 

 gardeners is required to keep in order those more elaborate places 

 in which the wealthier landowners take such justifiable pride, and 

 the smaller gardens, which in a country like this are numbered by 

 thousands, give occupation to a veritable army of trained and 

 intelligent men. In addition, the florists and nurserymen, the 

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