8 The Garden Beautiful 



beauty, but for the story they tell of the earth herself in 

 ages past. We gratefully take the lessons of Nature in 

 her most beautiful aspects of vegetation as to breadth, 

 airy spaces, massing and grouping of the woods that 

 fringe the valleys or garland the mountain rocks as 

 better beyond all that words can express than anything 

 men can invent or ever have invented. 



We love and prefer the divinely settled form of the 

 tree or shrub or flower beyond any possible expression 

 of man's misguided efforts with shears ; such as we see 

 illustrated in old Dutch books, where every living thing 

 is clipped to conform to an idea of 'design' that arose in 

 the minds of men to whom all trees were green things 

 to be cut into ugly walls. We repudiate as false and 

 ridiculous the common idea of the pattern book, that 

 these aspirations of ours are in any way 'styles', the 

 inventions of certain men, because we know that they 

 are based on eternal truths of Nature, free as the clouds 

 to any one who climbs the hills and has eyes to see. 



The true test of a flower garden. The fact that ignorant 

 men, who have never had the chance of learning these 

 lessons, make pudding-like clumps in a vain attempt to 

 diversify the surface of the ground, and other foolish 

 things, does not in the least turn us aside from following 

 the true and only ways to get the best expression possible 

 of beauty from any given morsel of the earth's surface 

 we have to plant. We sympathize with the landscape 

 painter's work as reflecting for us, though often faintly, 

 the wondrously varied beauty of the earth. We hold that 

 the only true test of our efforts in planting or gardening 

 is the picture. Do we frighten the artist away, or do we 

 bring him to see a garden so free from ugly patterns and 

 ugly colours that, seen in a beautiful light, it would be 



