GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. 13 



carpet pattern ! I am only speaking of what everyone must know 

 who cares the least about the subject, and of what can be seen 

 to-day in all the public gardens round London and Paris ; even 

 Kew, with the vast improvement of late years, has not emancipated 

 itself from this formal way of flower-planting, as we see there, in 

 front of the palm-house, purple beet marshalled in patterns. But 

 we shall never see beautiful flower gardens again until natural ways 

 of grouping flowers and variety of true form come back to us in the 

 flower-garden. 



After the central error above shown there comes a common one 

 of these writers, of supposing that those who seek natural form and 

 beauty in the garden and home-landscape are 

 The Wild Garden opposed to the necessary level and even formal 

 does not take spaces about a house. I wrote the " Wild Gar- 

 the place of the den " to save, not to destroy, the flower-garden ; 

 Flower-garden. j- o s how that we could have all the joy of spring 

 in orchard, meadow, or wood, lawn or grove, and 

 so save the true flower-garden near the house from being torn up twice 

 a year to effect what is called spring and summer " bedding." The 

 idea could be made clear to a child, and it is carried out in many 

 places easy to see. Yet there is hardly a cobbler who rushes from 

 his last to write a book on garden design who does not think that I 

 want to bring the wilderness in at the windows, I who have given all 

 my days to save the flower-garden from the ridiculous. A young lady 

 who has been reading one of these bad books, seeing the square beds 

 in my little south garden, says : " Oh ! why, you have a formal garden ! " 

 It is a small square embraced by walls, and I could not have used 

 any other form to get the best use of the space. They are just the 

 kind of beds made in like spaces by the gardeners of Nebuchadnezzar, 

 judging by what evidence remains to us. And he no more than I 

 mistook stones for bushes or bad carpets for flowers, but enjoyed vine 

 and fig and flower as Heaven sent them. All this wearisome mis- 

 understanding comes from writers not taking the trouble to under- 

 stand the simplest element of what they write about. 



The real flower-garden near the house is for the ceaseless care and 

 culture of many and diverse things often tender and in need of pro- 

 tection in varied and artificial soils, staking, cleaning, trials of novelties, 

 study of colour effects lasting many weeks, sowing and movings at all 

 seasons. The wild garden, on the other hand, is for things that take 

 care of themselves in the soil of the place, things which will endure for 

 generations if we suit the plants to the soil, like Narcissi on a rich 

 orchard bottom, or blue Anemone in a grove on the limestone soil 

 as in much of Ireland. This garden is a precious aid to the other, 

 inasmuch as it allows of our letting the flower-garden do its best 



