4 The Garden Beautiful 



because it did not fit into the bad carpet pattern. All 

 this can be seen to-day in the public gardens round 

 London and Paris ; even Kew, with the vast improve- 

 ment of late years, has not emancipated itself from this 

 ugly way of flower planting, as we see there, in front 

 of the Palm-house, purple Beet marshalled in patterns 

 and the whole laid out in imitation of the worst possible 

 pattern of carpet. But we shall never see beautiful 

 flower gardens again until natural ways of grouping 

 flowers and variety of true form come back to us in the 

 flower garden. 



The wild garden does not take the place of the /lower 

 garden. After the central error above shown there 

 comes a common one of these writers, of supposing that 

 those who seek natural form and beauty in the garden 

 and home landscape are opposed to the necessary level 

 spaces about a house. I wrote the ' Wild Garden ' to 

 save, not to destroy, the flower garden ; to show that 

 we could have all the joy of spring in orchard, meadow 

 or wood, lawn or grove, and to save the true flower garden 

 near the house from being torn up twice a year to effect 

 what is called spring and summer ' bedding '. The idea 

 could be made clear to a child, and it is carried out in 

 many places. Yet there is hardly a cobbler who rushes 

 from his last to write a book on garden design who does 

 not think that I want to bring the wilderness in at the 

 windows, who have given all my days to save the flower 

 garden from the ridiculous. A young lady who has been 

 reading one of these bad books, seeing the square beds 

 in my little south garden, says : ' Oh ! why, you have a 

 formal garden!' It is a small square embraced by walls, 

 and I could not have used any other form to get the best 

 use of the space. They are just the kind of beds made 



