234 STUDIES IN GARDENING 



purpose by human beings, or else they have assumed 

 that nothing useful can be beautiful, and have ig- 

 nored use in their pursuit of beauty. 



The proper problem of garden design, as of house- 

 building, is to make the useful beautiful; but it is 

 easier in garden design, because the uses of a garden 

 are all pleasant. Pleasure is its purpose; and so its 

 very ornaments, the flowers, are objects of utility in 

 it. But we shall not learn how to arrange them or 

 any of the other things proper to a garden until we 

 regard them all as objects of utility meant for the 

 enjoyment of human beings, and not as means of 

 making the garden look like something other than 

 what it was. Trees should be in a garden to give 

 shade, hedges to provide shelter or to serve as boun- 

 daries, paths to provide a dry passage from one place 

 to another; lawns for many purposes for games, 

 or to sit on, or to serve as a foil to flowers; and flower- 

 ing plants for ornament. If once a garden is thus 

 conceived, so to speak, in terms of utility, just as a 

 house is conceived by a good architect, a design formal 

 in the best sense of the word seems to follow as a 

 matter of course. But, just as there is all the differ- 

 ence in the world between formality in architecture 

 that is based upon utility and formality that is the 

 result of a desire to be formal, so it is with formality 

 in gardens. The one is living, the other is dead; the 

 one rational, the other irrational. A straight avenue 

 of pollarded limes is an instance of rational formality. 

 It is intended for a shady walk; and it is straight be- 



