TYPES OF GARDENS 



actually collected on the ground. The men who were possessed 

 with this delusion even went so far as to plant dead trees in their 

 shrubberies, because the " brown tree " was a recognised accessory in 

 the fashionable landscape painting of the time. Naturalism of this 

 sort was obviously every bit as formal as the more honest formality 

 of the architectural gardens in which trees were clipped into set 

 forms, into walls with niches for statuary, into arches and gateways, 

 and put to decorative uses such as nature never intended to assign to 

 them; and the notion that it was artistic was far more foolish than 

 any of the beliefs which were entertained by the frankly formal 

 gardeners about the kind of art that they affected. 

 There is little risk to-day of any revival of garden designing on 

 conventionally pictorial lines ; but there is, perhaps, a possibility that 

 the architect who is laying out a garden may be disposed to think 

 more of the claims of his art than of the right which nature has to be 

 taken into account in the planning of the work. Some reasonable 

 proportion must be maintained between the features which are 

 purely architectural and those which are, or ought to be, genuinely 

 naturalistic. To confine nature within bounds is permissible enough, 

 to exclude her or even to tie her down to playing an entirely minor 

 part is an error in policy and a departure from correct taste. The 

 designer must not be too ready to prefer the forms he can build to 

 those which she can create, and he must not deny to her the oppor- 

 tunity to modify his work. All he should do is to draw the outline, 

 the rilling in he must leave to her. 



Indeed, any such tendency on the part of the designer to assert the 

 importance of his performance against that of nature would imply 

 either that he was imperfectly equipped for the practice of his 

 profession, or that he had misconceived the purpose of his art. It 

 might even suggest that he was too lazy or unintelligent to think out 

 the real meaning of the work he had undertaken, or to foresee what 

 would be the results at which he ought to aim. There would be, 

 decidedly, an easy evasion of the chief responsibility in garden- 

 making if he were to try to make his design so fixed and immutable 

 that it would save him from considering what would be the future 

 developments of the garden that he had laid out. His chief and 

 most exacting duty must be to plan for the future, to look a long 

 way ahead, and to see clearly what his details would be like when by 

 years of natural growth they had reached their full proportions, for 

 it is upon these years of natural growth that he depends for the 

 proof of the Tightness of his design, and it is by them that the extent 

 of his ability as a gardener will be tested, 

 viii 



