INTRODUCTION xv 



and so are lawns and gravel paths. If we are to follow 

 nature in the design of our gardens we must do with- 

 out these, and even the wildest of wild gardeners will 

 scarcely go so far as that. We should remember that 

 the discredited landscape gardening of the last cen- 

 tury, with its "specimen" conifers, its irrelevant 

 shrubberies, and its aimlessly circuitous paths, was 

 itself an attempt to imitate nature. We are sick of 

 it now, not, as many suppose, because it was un- 

 natural, but because it was ugly; and it is an interest- 

 ing fact that William Morris, writing so far back as 

 the end of the seventies, attacked landscape garden- 

 ing, not for its artificiality, but for its lack of order 

 and design. He, with all his love of wild beauty, of 

 woods and meadows, said that a garden should "by 

 no means imitate either the wilfulness or the wildness 

 of nature, but should look like a thing never to be seen 

 except near a house." He knew that no work of art 

 should put on the airs of nature; that, as houses ought 

 not to be built to look like caves, so gardens ought 

 not to be designed to look like flowery meadows or 

 stretches of woodland. The beauty of nature is one 

 thing; the beauty of art another. Each has its own 

 romance, its own peculiar appeal to our memories 

 and affections; and these different appeals cannot be 

 combined in one. 



The love of gardens has always been so deep in 

 Englishmen that it survived even when their love of 

 all other beautiful things seemed for a while to be 

 dead; and, when they built the ugliest houses, they 



