CHAPTER H 



HOW TO PLAN A SMALL GARDEN 



IN these days of Town Planning and of garden cities, it is 

 well that the subject of garden design should not be entirely 

 neglected in a volume of this character. It is not every owner 

 of a garden to whom the opportunity is afforded of taking a share 

 in the planning and laying out of his plot of ground. If he live in 

 a great city or in the suburbs of a large town the chances are that 

 when he becomes the tenant of his house he finds the shape of 

 the garden inexorably fixed for him ; its paths constructed, its 

 beds and borders made, and its grass plot, such as it is, already 

 laid. It is either the work of the builder who has no soul above 

 bricks and mortar, or of the previous tenant, who has had neither 

 the time nor the inclination to make his garden a thing of beauty. 

 Happy the real lover of gardening who finds himself in a 

 position so fortunate that, either as the owner or the tenant of a 

 virgin strip of land, he is able to design his garden so that it 

 become, as it should do, a true reflection of his own personality 1 

 Less happy, but still fortunate, the gardener who succeeds an 

 owner or tenant with tastes akin to his own ! The garden may 

 not be all that he thinks it ought to be, but his keen and practised 

 eye soon tells him that by a slight diversion of a pathway here, 

 the widening of a border there, and the introduction of a bed 

 or series of beds elsewhere, the appearance of the garden can be 

 improved, so that it will be brought more nearly into conformity 

 with his ideas. Least fortunate of all is the enthusiast whose 

 means are somewhat limited, and who finds himself restricted to a 

 tiny area of ground upon which the Philistine hand of the specula- 

 tive builder has left its mark. The enterprising and obliging 

 builder has " laid out " the garden. He has, it is true, very crude 



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