ENGLISH IDEALS OF GARDENING 205 



galleries can never understand the purpose and full 

 beauty of Italian painting; they can never know 

 what a natural growth it was, until they see the frescoes 

 and altar-pieces where they were meant to be. Such 

 works in galleries are like picked flowers, still beauti- 

 ful indeed, but robbed of half their original beauty 

 because they have been severed from their native 

 soil; and just as an Italian of the fifteenth century 

 would feel if he saw the altar-piece of his native 

 Cathedral in the National Gallery, so we feel when 

 we see the flowers of our gardens picked and arranged 

 in bouquets in shop windows. Foreigners do not 

 usually seem to have this delight in the beauty of 

 growing flowers. They like them just as well picked 

 as growing. Indeed they are apt to grow them so 

 artificially that they have no more beauty when grow- 

 ing than when picked. For them flowers are always 

 mere ornaments, whether of the house or of the gar- 

 den. But for us they are living things with a beauty 

 dependent upon the whole of their life. This love of 

 flowers as living things, and therefore not only of 

 flowers but of plants, is the basis of English garden- 

 ing, the cause both of its virtues and of its faults. 

 It was overcome for a while in the last century and 

 in the gardens of the rich; but it persisted all the 

 while among cottagers; and it is from cottagers that 

 the rich regained it. There are beautiful cottage 

 gardens everywhere in England, because the English- 

 man loves growing flowers for their own sake, as the 

 German loves music; and it is this love of growing 



