TYPES OF GARDENS 



NE of the most obvious charms of the art of 

 gardening is the breadth of opportunity it 

 offers to the man with ideas who is seeking 

 for new ways of expressing his feeling for 

 design. It is a singularly adaptable art, one 

 in which there is endless scope for invention 

 and for the development of original devices of 

 arrangement ; and it is not bounded by a 

 narrow code of rules which make freedom of 

 action impossible. In gardening, indeed, an,y unconvention is 

 permissible if only it does not involve departure" from or contradic- 

 tion of nature ; and even a quite considerable degree of formal 

 regulation can be applied to natural facts without any offence against 

 artistic propriety if this regulating is done with sufficient taste and 

 common sense. 



But, of course, it is necessary that all the contrivances of the designer 

 should be guided by real respect for the spirit of garden-making. 

 This spirit inspires the achievement of every worker who is sincere 

 in his desire to be rightly original and aims at freshness of method ; 

 it is the motive force in every exposition of an art which has many 

 great and well-established traditions, and its influence is all-important 

 in determining the direction in which the garden designer must look 

 for his best results. Without its inspiration he is practically helpless 

 and his efforts must be ineffective ; his work will be artificial and 

 unmeaning, and its value as an expression of a serious conviction will 

 be practically inappreciable. 



The source of this guiding spirit is nature herself. No designer of 

 gardens can ignore nature or pretend to work without consideration 

 for her laws ; he is really in absolute dependence upon her and must 

 follow where she leads. If he were to attempt to plan a garden from 

 which she was to be excluded and in the making of which she was 

 to have no part, the result would hardly be a garden at all. It might 

 be an interesting piece of architectural construction, it might have a 

 striking character as an effort in engineering, it might be remarkable 

 as an example of the decorative treatment of an open space, but it 

 would inevitably be wanting in the charm and beauty which belong 

 almost as a matter of course to the true garden in which nature has 

 intervened from the first. Sooner or later, however, she would set 

 her mark even upon such a perversely human attempt at garden- 

 making, and, in her charity, she would try to hide the evidences of 

 failure due to man's conceit. By her magic touches, by weatherings, 



