TYPES OF GARDENS 



details arranged with due consideration for the sort of effect that he 

 might fairly expect to produce, and he could certainly find ways of 

 substituting for the dreary and hopeless gardening of the suburbs 

 something of more permanent interest. 



It is a pity that the characteristic methods of the Japanese cannot 

 be adopted in dealing with small English gardens. The miniature 

 landscapes which the Japanese garden designers build up often on 

 only a few square feet of ground are delightful in their quaintness 

 and in their ingenuity of contrivance, but they gain undeniably 

 additional beauty from the perfect suitability of their surroundings. 

 English domestic architecture, especially the architecture of the 

 suburbs, would agree badly enough with the particular forms of 

 garden-making which are so exquisitely appropriate in Japan. We 

 have to accept a different and more obvious kind of formality, one 

 which is as much in consonance with our manner of building as is 

 the miniature landscape with the architecture of Japan ; but, all the 

 same, we might learn much from the Japanese without attempting 

 to copy their individualities of style as to the principles on which 

 small scale gardening might be conducted. 



For the miniature Japanese landscapes are not really examples of 

 landscape gardening as we understand it. They are more akin to 

 the formal garden of the British Isles than to the free adaptations 

 of nature which are set out by our landscape gardeners. The 

 Japanese have quite definite rules by which the placing and the 

 character of the details out of which these little landscapes are built 

 up are determined, and they handle their materials in accordance 

 with specific traditions. But they are more flexible in their formality 

 and more personal in their methods, and they have, too, a truer 

 perception of the ways in which nature can be properly conven- 

 tionalised. They have acquired the art of being artificial without 

 being affected, of designing on nature's lines without pretending to 

 be realistic, and of being formal without lapsing into pedantry ; and 

 as a consequence they use the means at their disposal with charming 

 skill and in a manner that is artistic in the best sense of the word. 

 The danger that our designers of formal gardens have to be on their 

 guard against is of becoming too artistic. It is the danger to which 

 so many of our earlier gardeners succumbed during that period when 

 the pure formality of the old gardens was abandoned for a spurious 

 naturalism. The idea at that time was that the art of gardening 

 consisted in planting pictures, in building up arrangements which 

 should be purposely and professedly picturesque and in which all the 

 details which a painter would set down upon his canvas would be 

 b vii 



