152 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



competent to judge. If only out of compliment to 

 your architect and to the formal angularities of his 

 building, let the ground immediately about the house 

 be of an ornamental dressed character. 



Avoid the misplaced rusticity of the fashionable 

 landscape-gardener, who with his Nebuchadnezzar 

 tastes would turn everything into grass, would cart 

 away the terrace and all its adjuncts, do away with 

 all flowers, and " lawn your hundred good acres 

 of wheat," as Repton says, if you will only let him, 

 and if you have them. 



In his devotion to grass, his eagerness to display 

 the measure of his art in the curves of shrubberies 

 and the arrangement of specimen plants that strut 

 across your lawn or dot it over as the Sunday 

 scholars do the croft when they come for their 

 annual treat, he quite forgets the flowers forgets 

 the old intent of a garden as the House Beautiful 

 of the civilised world the place for nature-rapture, 

 colour-pageantry, and sweet odours. " Here the 

 foreground is a sloping lawn ; the flowers are mostly 

 arranged near the kitchen garden." Anywhere, 

 anywhere out of the way ! Or if admitted at all 

 into view of the house, it shall be with little limited 

 privileges, and the stern injunction 



"If you speak you must not show your face, 

 Or if you show your face you must not speak." 



So much for the garden- craft of the best modern 

 landscape-gardener and its relation to flowers. If 

 this be the garden of the " Gardenesque " style, as 

 it is proudly called, I personally prefer the garden 

 without the style. 



