Garden design and recent writings upon it 3 



Patterns of flowers and carpet-beds things of our own 

 time. Moreover, on top of all this formality of design of 

 our own day were grafted the most formal and inartistic 

 ways of arranging flowers that ever came into the head 

 of man, ways happily unknown to the Italians or the 

 makers of the earliest terraced gardens. The true Italian 

 gardens were often beautiful with trees in their natural 

 forms; but bedding out, or marshalling the flowers in 

 geometrical patterns, is entirely a thing of our own time, 

 and ' carpet ' gardening is simply a further remove in 

 ugliness. The painted gravel gardens of Nesfield and 

 Barry and other broken-brick gardeners were also at- 

 tempts to get rid of the flowers and get rigid formality 

 instead. Part of the garden architect's scheme was to 

 forbid the growth of plants on walls, as at Shrubland, 

 where, for many years, there were strict orders that the 

 walls were not to have a flower or a creeper of any kind 

 upon them. As these patterned gardens were made by 

 persons often ignorant of gardening, and if planted in 

 any human way with flowers would all ' go to pieces *, 

 the idea arose of setting them out as they appeared on the 

 drawing-board, some of the beds not more than a foot 

 in diameter, blue and yellow paints being used where 

 the broken brick and stone did not give the desired 

 colour! 



Loss of old garden ways. With the adoption in most 

 large and show places of the patterned garden, both 

 in design and planting, disappeared almost everywhere 

 the old English garden, that is, one with a variety of 

 form of shrub and flower and even low trees ; and now 

 we only find this kind of garden here and there in 

 Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland, and on the outskirts 

 of country towns. All true plant form was banished 



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