THE 



GARDEN BEAUTIFUL 



CHAPTER I 



GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT 



OF all things made by man for his pleasure a flower 

 garden has the least cause to be ugly, barren, or stereo- 

 typed, because in it we may have the fairest of the 

 earth's children in a living, ever-changeful state, and 

 not, as in other arts, mere representations of them. And 

 yet we find in nearly every country place, pattern 

 plans, conventional design, and the garden robbed of 

 all life and grace by setting out flowers in geometric 

 ways. A recent writer on garden design tells us that 

 the gardener's knowledge is of no account, and that 

 gardens 



should never have been allowed to fall into the hands of the 

 gardener or out of those of the architect ; that it is an archi- 

 tectural matter, and should have been schemed at the same 

 time and by the same hand as the house itself. 



The chief error here is in saying that people, whom 

 he calls ' landscapists ', destroyed all the ' formal ' gar- 

 dens in England, and that they had their ruthless way 

 until his coming. An extravagant statement, as must 

 be clear to any one who takes the trouble to look 

 into the thing itself, which many of these writers will 

 not do nor regard the elementary facts of what they 

 write about. Many of the most formal gardens in 



B 



