ENGLISH IDEALS OF GARDENING 



GARDENING in England, like music in Ger- 

 many, is a national and popular art; and just 

 as music in Germany is based upon folk song, so gar- 

 dening in England is based upon the cottage garden. 

 German music, when it has tended to become arti- 

 ficial or exotic, has been simplified and quickened 

 by a return to folk song, the lasting affection for which 

 has protected the German taste in music from those 

 perversities to which it is subject in other arts. It 

 has provided a standard of simplicity and sincerity 

 by which even the most elaborate compositions are 

 judged, just the kind of standard which Tolstoy has 

 tried to set up in his "What is Art?" And the Eng- 

 lish cottage garden has provided the same kind of 

 standard for the art of gardening, and in the same 

 way has redeemed that art from exotic perversities. 

 When the bedding-out mania was at its height, it 

 was the spectacle of cottage gardens, with their beauty 

 that seemed as natural to the English countryside 

 as the very meadows and hedgerows, which gave 

 people a disgust for their rows of Calceolarias and 

 Geraniums and Lobelias. But for the cottage gar- 

 dens they would never have been even aware of the 

 existence of all the beautiful old plants which had 



been banished so long from the gardens of the rich; 



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