THE USE OF GARDENS 



makers of garden furniture, the workers in such apparently remote 

 trades as brick and tile making, hydraulic engineering, and the like, 

 and even, more remotely still, the carvers, the bronze and lead 

 founders, and the other workers in stone and metal, who provide 

 the vases, fountains, sun-dials, statuary, and other accessory garden 

 adornments, have all of them a very real and practical interest in 

 the art of gardening ; and there is a mass of unskilled labour besides 

 which finds a living in many of the industries with which the 

 gardener has to do at one time or another. If blind utilitarianism, 

 demanding that money should be spent only upon work which 

 brings in a direct and immediate return, were admitted as the right 

 principle in existence, and if gardening were driven from the place 

 it holds in the estimation of cultivated people, the loss would not 

 be merely a sentimental one but would affect very prejudicially 

 working people of all classes. 



Moreover, the garden is actually a trade asset ; the house with 

 what the estate agents call a "well-established" garden will usually 

 command a better price and is easier to let or sell than one which 

 stands in merely a bare patch of ground. The value of residential 

 property is distinctly enhanced by the outlay upon those accessories 

 and decorative adjuncts which the gardener can supply, so that 

 even if his art is measured by the bald and unsympathetic com- 

 mercial standard, it proves to be not incapable of being made to 

 pay. But, after all, this is but a sordid view to take of the use of 

 gardens : it should be sufficient to argue that they are important 

 aesthetically and educationally, that they encourage the study and 

 worship of nature, that they add to the sum total of human enjoy- 

 ment, and, best of all, that they provide men with an infallible 

 antidote to the poisonous influences of a life spent in the pursuit of 

 material aims. Their commercial interest can be left for discussion 

 by that class of person whose eyes, fixed always upon pounds, 

 shillings and pence, are blind to the charms of nature and to every 

 manifestation of her beauty. It is, anyhow, only the opinion of the 

 man of taste, who loves the garden for its own sake and understands 

 what it means, that counts at all. 



Indeed, it is very evident that we owe a vast debt of gratitude 

 to these men of taste, who have in this country opposed so 

 consistently and efficiently everything which might impair the 

 vitality of the art of gardening. Their activity, continued through 

 many centuries, has always been in the direction of progress, and has 

 been inspired by a real anxiety to improve the conditions under 

 which this type of artistic achievement could be practised. This 



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