:' ^^Introduction 



successful? Is there one of them that compels a 

 second glance except that of disgust ? Do even well- 

 grown plants, when they happen to exist under such 

 conditions, serve to redeem the absolute lack of the 

 imaginative faculty such gardens proclaim ? True, 

 they are simple enough, but it is the simplicity of the 

 building plot, not of the garden, the simplicity of a 

 barren negation and ugly inanity, but it is not beautiful. 

 But the garden to be successful must be beautiful, and 

 ' Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, hand- 

 some, but until they speak to the imagination not yet 

 beautiful/' and simplicity in the garden must there- 

 fore mean something more than mere severity of line 

 and neglect of all design. 



It is essential, then, that the garden to be good must- 

 be of good design. This is equally true of the large 

 or small garden ; but if it is applicable to the large, 

 wherein many crudities of conception may be to some 

 extent redeemed by the existence of indestructible 

 natural features, how much more important is it when 

 considering the small garden plot. In the first case 

 there may be fine trees, natural slopes and undulations, 

 and a general air of spaciousness that partly obliterates 

 the sense of bad work in garden design. In the latter 

 the small garden plot has little beauty of its own ; 

 it is " cabin' d, cribb'd, confin'd," by a sense of 

 fences that seem always too near. Its outline, con- 

 forming to the commercial instincts of the land agent 

 who has cut up the estate into building plots, is usually 

 the direct opposite of all that makes for beauty. To 

 the gardener such outlines exist only to be hidden, and 

 hidden in such a way that the very material used for 



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