I 4 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



work because relieved of the intolerable and ugly needs of the bed- 

 ding system in digging up the garden twice a year. 



Very often now terms of gardening are misapplied, confusing the 

 mind of the student, and the air is full of a new term the " formal " 



garden. For ages gardens of simple form have been 

 Misuse of terms, common without anyone calling them " formal " 



until our own time of too many words confusing 

 thoughts. Seeing an announcement that there was a paper in the 

 Studio on the " Formal Garden in Scotland," I looked in it, seeking 

 light, and found only plans of the usual approaches necessary for 

 a country house, for kitchen, hall door, or carriage-way. And we 

 gardeners of another sort do not get in like the bats through the 

 roof, but have also ways, usually level, to our doors, but we do not 

 call them " formal gardens." There are gardens to which the term 

 " formal" might with some reason be applied. Here are a few words 

 about such by one Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose clear eyes saw beauty 

 if there was any to be seen in earth or sky : 



We saw the palace and gardens of Versailles full of statues, vases, fountains, and 

 colonnades. In all that belongs essentially to a garden they are extraordinarily 

 deficient. 



A few more by Victor Hugo : 



There fountains gush from the petrified gods, only to stagnate ; trees are 

 forced to submit to the grotesque caprices of the shears and line. Natural beauty is 

 everywhere contradicted, inverted, upset, destroyed. 



And Robert Southey tells us of one 



where the walks were sometimes of lighter or darker gravel, red or yellow sand, 

 and, when such materials were at hand, pulverised coal and shells. The garden 

 itself was a scroll-work cut very narrow, and the interstices filled with sand of 

 different colours to imitate embroidery. 



Such gardens may be called formal without too much disregard of 

 language, and yet one might plant every one of them beautifully 

 without in the least altering their outline. It is only where the 

 plants of a garden are rigidly set out in geometrical design, as in 

 carpet-gardening and bedding-out, that the term "formal" is rightly 

 applied. 



We live in a time when men write about garden design unmeaning 

 words or absolute nonsense ; these, as anyone may see, are men 

 who have had no actual contact with the work. They think garden 

 design is a question that can be settled on a drawing-board, and have 

 not the least idea that in any true .sense the art is not possible 

 without knowledge of many beautiful living things, and that the right 

 planting of a country place is of far greater importance than the 

 ground-plan about the house. 



