TYPES OF GARDENS 



and he stands in the way of the men who are still working sincerely 

 on the side of progress and development. 



Fortunately, we have amongst us at the present time a very large 

 number of garden designers who have the fullest possible appreciation 

 of their responsibilities and a thorough perception of the need for 

 not only keeping alive the better traditions of their art, but also for 

 establishing new principles which will be in accord with the change 

 in conditions that has been brought about by the change in our 

 modes of life. A few generations ago garden-making was in danger 

 of sinking into a very dull convention which took nothing into 

 account except the dictates of a fashion which was based neither 

 upon artistic reason or practical common sense ; and while this 

 fashion lasted, much was done that seems to us to-day to have been 

 inexpressibly foolish. But now there is no prevailing fashion, and 

 there is no fixed dogma to which conformity is demanded by 

 popular opinion. The people who want gardens are quite as ready 

 to welcome new ideas as the designers are to supply them ; and with 

 the experience of the past to draw upon, with many enlightening 

 suggestions and useful warnings to be obtained from the performances 

 of our predecessors, we are witnessing a revival of garden-making 

 which promises to carry the art further than it has ever gone 

 before. 



There are not, it is true, many opportunities to-day for laying out 

 vast pleasure grounds round some royal palace or lordly mansion ; 

 there is, if anything, a tendency to allow the great gardens which 

 have survived from the past to go out of cultivation and to lose their 

 character through neglect. But social changes have brought into 

 existence a large class of moderately wealthy men who are building 

 themselves houses of some pretensions, and to whom the idea of 

 possessing a garden which will do credit to their taste commends 

 itself as important. These men have the good sense to recognise 

 that the modern house needs a setting which will sufficiently reflect 

 the modern spirit, and that to try to put round a piece of twentieth- 

 century architecture the sort of garden which agrees well enough 

 with a mediaeval castle or a Georgian country house would lead to a 

 very evident misfitting of styles. So they call in the services of the 

 garden designer, who has his own way of solving the difficulty, and 

 he, knowing what is wanted, gives them something which is entirely 

 congruous and right in its expression of its purpose. 

 But the creation of this new and essentially modern type of garden, 

 this delicately finished design worked out within a comparatively 

 limited space, should not make us forget the debt we owe to the 

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