CHAPTER II. 



GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. 



OF all the things made by man for his pleasure a flower-garden has 

 the least business to be ugly, barren, or stereotyped, because in it we 

 may have the fairest of the earth's children in a living, ever-changeful 

 state, and not, as in other arts, mere representations of them. And 

 yet we find in nearly every country place, pattern plans, conventional 

 design, and the garden robbed of all life and grace by setting out 

 flowers in geometric ways. A recent writer on garden design tells us 

 that the gardener's knowledge is of no account, and that gardens 



should never have been allowed to fall into the hands of the gardener or out of 

 those of the architect ; that it is an architectural matter, and should have been 

 schemed at the same time and by the same hand as the house itself. 



The chief error he makes is in saying that people, whom he 

 calls " landscapists," destroyed all the formal gardens in England, 



and that they had their ruthless way until his 



Formal gardens coming. An extravagant statement, as must be 



made in our clear to anyone who takes the trouble to look 



own day. into the thing itself, which many of these writers 



will not do or regard the elementary facts of 

 what they write about. Many of the most formal gardens in 

 England have been made within the past century, when this writer 

 says all his ideal gardens were cleared away. The Crystal Palace, 

 the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Kensington, Shrub- 

 land, Witley Court, Castle Howard, Mentmore, Drayton, Crewe 

 Hall, Alton Towers, and scores of pretentious places. During the 

 whole of that period there was hardly a country seat laid out that 

 was not marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and 

 patterned thing. So far from formal gardens being abolished, as the 

 Irish peasant said of absentees, " the country is full of them ! " With 

 Castle Howards, Trenthams, and Chatsworths staring at him, it is 

 ludicrous to see a young architect weeping over their loss. Even 

 when there is no money to waste in walls and gigantic water-squirts 

 the idea of the terrace is still carried out often in plains and other 



