74 THE PARKS AND GAKDENS OF PAIUS. [Chap. IV. 



lovely efiect should be lost, a fire-sliovel pattern wrought on the 

 earth, with all the beds filled with broken stone-rubbish of various 

 colours ! In short, there is no room anywhere except on parched 

 and wearying gravel walks. At every step a sensitive person 

 who visits the garden in the hope of seeing trees or plants or 

 flowers is offended by a sickly low-clipped yew-hedge, a dead 

 wall, a flight of steps, or a ghastly corridor. If a prize had been 

 off'ered for the very worst kind of garden in which to enjoy a 

 flower-show or plants or trees of any kind, a garden more fitted 

 to win it could scarcely have been designed. It is true that of 

 late improvements have been carried out by the simple removal of 

 some of the features alluded to. Every step in removing hedges 

 or mazes or gravelled panels is accompanied by an immediate 

 improvement in the general aspect of the garden. These are 

 some of the results we get by employing men to plan or direct 

 our national gardens who are not, in the true sense of the 

 word, landscape-gardeners. 



There is nothing so dangerous to the beautiful but as yet 

 undeveloped art of landscape-gardening as its practice by 

 men into whose life the love and knowledge of it has not been 

 interwoven by long practice and devotion. Thus, if we have an 

 architect who does us the honour to add the term gardener to that 

 of his own profession, we are very likely to see stones where we 

 asked for grass and flowers and trees. His heart is in buildings, 

 and accordingly he is not always content to limit architecture to 

 its legitimate use, but brings it into the garden to the invariable 

 ruin of the latter. Hence a thousand things that men will cart 

 away as abominations, ugly, costly, and in all ways hateful, as 

 soon as they understand what pure landscape-gardening might 

 do towards the adornment of the willing earth ; hence the gardens 

 at Versailles, mouldering, slimy, dead as the state of things that 

 gave them birth — a garden tomb, in fact ; hence the fountains 

 and geometrical desert at the Crystal Palace, acres of unclean 

 water-basins, horizons of dead walls, decay of stone, gigantic 

 water-spouting apparatus ; hence such unmeaning wastes as those 

 of Trafalgar Square and that at the Bayswater end of the Serpen- 

 tine : these constitute a little of what we get by having an 

 architect to carry out that which should be entrusted to an artist 

 gardener. To a painter we are actually indebted for the revival 



