50 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



for the sake of display, no transitory style of another country, interfered 

 with the unconscious but definite working out of these forces. The 

 makers of these cottage gardens were poor and forced to consider the 

 practicality of everything they did. They were tenacious of tradition, 

 home-loving, dwelling in the same holding for generation after genera- 

 tion, each man adding his little, as circumstances allowed, to what he 

 received from his father and planned to leave to his son. The gardens 

 were placed close about the houses to be easy of cultivation ; they were 

 small, hedged in, fitted to the topography, making careful use of local 

 opportunities and local materials, often given over largely to the growth 

 of vegetables, with the flowers perhaps lining their walks or filling In 

 odd corners by the door of the house, and with roses and flowering vines 

 covering the walls, the gate, and even clambering over the roof of the 

 house itself. The choice of local material for the house as well as for 

 the outlying walls, the use of thatch or thick and irregular slate on the 

 roof, the closeness of adaptation of the house and its dependencies to the 

 ground (see Drawing XXIV, opp. p. 192), which comes from gradual 

 growth and the natural unwillingness of the poor man to undertake any 

 avoidable excavation or construction, the rich enshrouding of ivy 

 growing untouched for centuries, and the exuberance of hardy flowering 

 plants, protected but not restrained, — all tend to make the typical 

 English cottage with its garden almost in itself a natural object,* — 

 something so largely the work of time and so little the conscious design 

 of man as to be hard to imitate under other circumstances, but still an 

 excellent source of inspiration to any one who is seeking to make a 

 smaller building and its grounds and the surrounding landscape all 

 parts of one composition. (See Drawing VII, opposite.) 

 The New Many of the early Pilgrims and Puritans left just such cottages 



England ^^^ cottage gardens as we have been discussing when they came from 



Sfylg the old England to the New. Their first permanent houses were 



as like those to which they were accustomed as It was possible for 

 them to build from the somewhat unaccustomed materials at hand. 



* See the illustrations in books on English cottages such as Ditchfield's Picturesque 

 English Cottages and their Doorway Gardens (1905), Dawber and Davie's " Old Cottage" 

 books for Cotswold, Kent, etc., published by Batsford, or Old English Country Cot' 

 tages, edited by Charles Holme, published by " The Studio," 1906. 



