4 STUDIES IN GARDENING 



beyond the shadow of these desolate conifers a stunted 

 thicket of snowberry suckers and sometimes a straggling 

 bush of gorse 1 or laurustinus; while the ground, if 

 not entirely covered with ivy or Rose of Sharon, will 

 be ornamented here and there with sickly clumps 

 of heather or stray seedlings of the coarsest plants 

 from other parts of the garden. A spectacle of this 

 kind is so common, that, like the ugliness of most 

 houses, it only fills us with a vague kind of discomfort. 

 We, no more than the owners of the neglected bank, 

 attempt to analyse what is wrong. We only feel 

 that we should not like to live in a house with that 

 kind of ugliness about it. 



Now it is unjust to condemn any system of gar- 

 dening wholesale because of its worst examples; but 

 it is fair to point out that banks treated in this way 

 are the result of the misapplication of the principles 

 of landscape gardening to small gardens. For it is 

 such landscape gardening that has made people in- 

 different to trimness and neatness, or rather has 

 given them an excuse for evading the trouble which 

 is necessary to keep a garden neat and trim. The 

 owners of such banks can always console themselves 

 with the thought that there is no formality about 

 them. But in most cases, no doubt, they make no 

 conscious excuse for their neglect. Bad landscape 

 gardening, the kind of gardening practised by the 



x For Gorse the American gardener may read Forsythia or Spiraea: the 

 Laurustinus is not hardy in the United States except on the Pacific 

 Coast. L. Y. K. 



