A LILY TANK 143 



kind of happiness, it can only be classed among 

 others of those comfortless considerations that per- 

 plex and worry the mind with the feeling that they 

 are too much, and yet not enough. 



For the formal garden of the best type I can picture 

 to myself endless possibilities both of beauty and 

 delight — for though my own limited means have in a 

 way obliged me to practise only the free and less 

 costly ways of gardening, such as give the greatest 

 happiness for the least expenditure, and are therefore 

 the wisest ways for most people to walk in — yet I 

 also have much pleasure in formal gardens of the 

 best kinds. But it must be nothing less than the very 

 best, and it is necessarily extremely costly, because it 

 must entail much building beautifully designed and 

 wrought. It must also have an unbounded supply of 

 water, for so only could one work out all the best 

 possibilities of such a garden. 



There seems to me to be a whole mine of wealth 

 waiting to be worked for the benefit of such gardens, 

 for, as far as I am aware, what might now be done has 

 never been even attempted with any degree of care- 

 ful or serious study. When one thinks of the very 

 few plants known for garden use to the ancients, and 

 to those who built and planted the noble gardens of 

 the Italian Renaissance, and when one compares this 

 limited number with the vast range of beautiful shrubs 

 and plants we now have to choose from, one cannot 

 help seeing how much wider is the scope for keen 

 and critical discrimination. And though some of the 

 plants most anciently in cultivation, such as the Rose, 



