288 STUDIES IN GARDENING 



Daffodils about a stream in an open meadow. Take 

 these away from their surroundings and they are still 

 beautiful; but they have lost almost as much of their 

 beauty as the Columbines in the Bacchus and Ariadne 

 would lose if they were cut out of the canvas. 



The best kind of gardening is based upon a sense 

 of the beauty, not merely of individual flowers, but of 

 flowers growing in natural conditions; yet gardening, 

 like all art, must do something more than imitate 

 nature. We cannot even pretend to provide many 

 of our finest garden plants with natural conditions. 

 They are like domesticated animals that in this coun- 

 try need constant human care if they are to thrive. 

 And then we have to remember that nature is often 

 content to make a particular spot beautiful with 

 flowers for only two or three weeks in the year. Dur- 

 ing these weeks that spot may be the despair of the 

 gardener, but at other times it is overgrown with 

 weeds. Nature makes no compromises, but the gar- 

 dener must be always making them. And yet, like 

 other artists, while he modifies nature to suit his own 

 purposes, he must still keep a respect for her modesty 

 and a love of her beauty in his heart. He should never 

 be a mere virtuoso and do violence to nature just to 

 show how clever he is. Flowers are the facts of a 

 garden, and they must not be distorted or exaggerated 

 or wrongly related to each other, for they are facts 

 beautiful in themselves and introduced only for that 

 reason; and they all have a certain character in their 

 beauty which can be strengthened or weakened by 



