Flower gardening and garden design 19 



So far we have spoken of the work of the true artist, 

 which is always marked by respect for nature and by 

 keen study of it ; but apart from this we have a great 

 many men who do what is called 'decorative* work, 

 useful, but still not art in the sense of delight in, and 

 study of, things as they are the whole class of decora- 

 tors, who make our carpets, tiles, curtains, and who 

 adapt conventional or geometric forms mostly to flat 

 surfaces. Skill in this way may be considerable without 

 any attention whatever being paid to the art that is 

 concerned with life in its fulness. 



This it is well to see clearly, as for the flower 

 gardener it matters much on which side he stands. Our 

 gardeners for ages have suffered at the hands of the 

 decorative artist, when applying his 'designs' to the 

 garden, and designs which may be quite right on a flat 

 surface like a carpet or panel have been applied a thou- 

 sand times to the surface of the reluctant earth. It is 

 this adapting of absurd 'knots' and patterns from old 

 books to any surface where a flower garden has to be 

 made that leads to bad and frivolous design wrong 

 in plan and hopeless for the life of plants. It is so 

 easy for any one asked for a plan to furnish one of 

 this sort without the slightest knowledge of the life of 

 a garden. 



Degradation of flowers. And so for ages the flower 

 garden was marred by absurdities of this kind as re- 

 gards plan, though the flowers were in simple and 

 natural ways. But in our own time the same ' decora- 

 tive ' idea has come to be carried out in the planting 

 of the flowers under the name of ' bedding out ', ' carpet 

 bedding/ or ' mosaic culture ', in which the beautiful 

 forms of flowers are degraded to the level of crude colour 



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