14 The Garden Beautiful 



I have never heard anybody enthusiastic about their 

 artistic merits. So far as our island countries go, nothing 

 asks for more care and modest art than the introduction 

 into the garden or home landscape of artificial water. 

 Happily our countries are rich in the charms of natural 

 water too often neglected in its planting. 



Talk of the day about art. Among the great peoples 

 of old was one supreme in art, from buildings chiselled as 

 delicately as the petals of the wild Rose to their smallest 

 coins and bits of baked clay in their graves, and this is 

 clear to all men from what remains of their work gathered 

 from the mud and dust of ages. And from that time of 

 deathless beauty in art comes the voice of one who saw 

 this lovely art in its fulness : The greatest and fairest 

 things are done by Nature and the lesser by Art (Plato). 

 There is not a garden in Britain, free from convention 

 and carpet gardening, from the cottage gardens nestling 

 beneath the Surrey hills to those fair and varied gardens 

 in Cornwall, which does not tell the same story to all 

 who have eyes to see and hearts to care for the thing 

 itself. The only sad thing is that such words must be 

 said again and again ; but we live in a time of much 

 printed fog about artistic things— the 'New Art' and the 

 'New Aesthetic'; 'Evolution,' which explains how every- 

 thing comes from nothing and goes back again to worse 

 than nothing ; the sliding bog of ' realism and idealism ' 

 in which the phrasemonger may dance around and say 

 the same false thing ten times over ; and, last and not 

 least of all among these imbecilities, the teaching that to 

 form a garden one had better know nothing of the things 

 that should grow in it, from the Cedar of Lebanon to the 

 Violets of the alpine rocks. 



This teaching is as false as any spoken or written 



