Flower gardening and garden design 2 1 



Landscape painting and gardens. There are few 

 pictures of gardens, because the garden beautiful is 

 rare. Gardens around country houses, instead of form- 

 ing, as they might, graceful foregrounds to a good 

 landscape, disfigure it all, and drive the artist away in 

 despair. Yet there may be real pictures in gardens ; it 

 is not a question of patterns, but one of light and shade, 

 beauty of form, and colour. In times when gardens 

 were made by men who did not know one tree from 

 another, the matter was settled by the shears — it was 

 a question of green walls only. Now we are beginning 

 to see that there is a wholly different and higher order 

 of beauty to be sought for in gardens, and we are at the 

 beginning of a period when we may hope to get much 

 more pleasure and instruction out of this art than ever 

 before. 



Artists of real power would paint gardens and home 

 landscapes if there were real pictures to draw; but 

 generally they are so rare that the work does not come 

 into the artist's view at all. Through all the rage of 

 the ' bedding-out ' fever, it was impossible for an artist 

 to paint gardens hke those which disfigured the land 

 from Blair Athol to the Crystal Palace. It is difficult to 

 imagine Corot sitting down to paint the Grande Trianon, 

 or the terrace patterns at Versailles, though a poor ham- 

 let in the north of France, with a few willows near, gave 

 him a lovely picture. Once, when trying to persuade 

 Mr. Mark Fisher, the landscape painter, to come into 

 a district remarkable for its natural beauty, he replied : 

 ' There are too many gentlemen's places there to suit 

 my work,' referring to the hardness and ugliness of the 

 effects around most country seats, owing to the iron- 

 bound pudding-clumps of trees, railings, capricious clip- 



