20 The Garden Beautiful 



to make a design, without reference to the natural form 

 or beauty of the plants, clipping being freely done to 

 get the carpets or patterns ' true '. When these tracery 

 gardens were made by people without any knowledge 

 of the plants of a garden, they were found difficult 

 to plant, hence there were attempts to do without the 

 gardener, and get colour by the use of broken brick, 

 white sand, and painted stone. All such work is wrong 

 and degrading to the art of gardening, and in its extreme 

 expressions is ridiculous. 



The term ' artistic '. As I use the word ' artistic ' in a 

 book on the flower garden, it may be well to say that it 

 is used to mean right and true in relation to all the con- 

 ditions of the case, and the necessary limitations of all 

 human arts. A lovely Greek coin, a bit of canvas painted 

 by Corot with the morning light on it, a block of stone 

 hewn into the shape of a dying gladiator, the white 

 mountain rocks built into a Parthenon— these are all 

 examples of human art, every one of which can only be 

 fairly judged with due regard to what is possible in the 

 material of each — knowledge which it is essential the 

 artist should possess. Often a garden may be wrong in 

 various ways — as conifers spread in front of many a 

 house ; ugly in form, or not in harmony with our native 

 or best garden vegetation, as shown in mountain trees 

 set out on dry plains and not even hardy ; so that the 

 word inartistic may help us to describe many such 

 errors. Again, if we are happy enough to find a garden 

 so true and right in its results as to form a picture 

 that an artist would be charmed to study, we may call 

 it an artistic garden, as a short way of saying that it 

 is about as good as it may be, taking everything into 

 account. 



