TYPES OF GARDENS 



which owe no small part of their attractiveness to the beauty of the 

 parks and public gardens that occupy the open spaces among the 

 miles of streets. The garden, in fact, in one or other of its many 

 forms, is the influence which softens off the formalities of the world 

 in which we live and justifies the love we have for it by the help it 

 gives us in our endeavour to look upon the bright side of existence. 

 Without such a link with nature we should be in very real danger of 

 sinking into hopeless materialism and of losing what remains to us of 

 healthy sentiment and quiet romance ; the artificialities of civilisation 

 would overwhelm us and we should degenerate from sensitive, 

 thinking beings into mere parts of a complicated social machine. 

 It is the love of nature, the pleasure we derive from contact with her 

 and from observation of her works, that does most to keep us ment- 

 ally alive, and it is in the garden that she visits us and whispers 

 encouraging words as she walks with us hand in hand. 

 It is of vital importance that we should never forget what the art of 

 gardening means to us and how it prevents us from descending into 

 dull and mechanical habits of thought. It must never be allowed to 

 become stereotyped, to lapse into the foolish repetition of a stock 

 formula or to follow unintelligently a hard and fast code of rules. 

 The first essential of gardening is variety ; it must always be 

 expressing new ideas, derived, of course, from nature and adapted 

 to fit the necessities of each particular subject and locality. The 

 true garden is essentially an inspiration, a sort of temperamental 

 translation of nature, and the extent of its attractiveness is in direct 

 relation to the amount of influence that nature has been allowed to 

 exercise in bringing about the final result. There must be, too, a 

 very apparent connection between the garden and the surroundings 

 in which it is placed ; there must be, that is to say, a certain agree- 

 ment between the type of design chosen and the situation in which 

 the designer is called upon to work. Each kind of garden has its 

 own character, and each one is appropriate to some spot into which 

 it fits seemingly as a matter of course what this character may be 

 and how it will assort with local conditions it is the first duty of the 

 garden-maker to find out. 



For, assuredly, every type of garden that satisfies the fundamental 

 principles of garden-making is right in its proper place. One 

 situation demands the formal garden, another the deliberately 

 arranged and carefully studied landscape design ; another, again, 

 simply the judicious formalising and regulating of wild nature. It 

 would be as foolish to argue that the formal garden is the only one 

 which deserves the attention of the designer, as to say that the 

 IV 



