GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. 15 



In many books on garden design the authors misuse words and 

 confuse ideas. One, writing on the gardens of Hampton Court, is 

 not satisfied with the terms " garden design," or " laying out gardens," 

 but uses the word " gardenage." Another writes " lay-out " for " plan." 

 Many, not satisfied with the good word, " landscape gardener," used 

 by Loudon, Repton, and many other excellent men, call themselves 

 " landscape architects " a stupid term of French origin implying the 

 union of two absolutely distinct studies, one dealing with varied life 

 in a thousand different kinds and the natural beauty of the earth, and 

 the other with stones and bricks and their putting together. The 

 training for either of these arts is wide apart from the training 

 demanded for the other, and the earnest practice of one leaves no 

 time, even if there were the genius, for the other. 



The term landscape-planting is often scoffed at by these writers, 



yet it is a good one with a clear meaning, which is the grouping and 



growth of trees in natural forms as opposed to 



Landscape the universal aligning, clipping, and shearing of 



gardening. the Dutch ; the natural incidence of light and 



shade and breadth as the true guide in all artistic 



planting. The term landscape-gardening is a true and, in the fullest 



sense, good English one, with a clear and even beautiful meaning, 



namely, the study of the forms of the earth, and frank acceptance 



of them as the best of all for purposes of beauty or use of planter 



or gardener, save where the surface is so steep that one must alter 



it to work upon it. 



We accept the varied slopes of the river bank and the path of the 

 river as not only better than those of a Dutch canal, but a hundred 

 times better ; and not only for their beauty, but for the story they tell 

 of the earth herself in ages past. We gratefully take the lessons of 

 Nature in her most beautiful aspects of vegetation as to breadth, 

 airy spaces, massing and grouping of the woods that fringe the 

 valleys or garland the mountain rocks as better beyond all that 

 words can express than anything men can invent or ever have 

 invented. 



We love and prefer the divinely-settled form of the tree or shrub 

 or flower beyond any possible expression of man's misguided efforts 

 with shears, such as we see illustrated in old Dutch books where 

 every living thing is clipped to conform to an idea of " design " that 

 arose in the minds of men to whom all trees were green things to be 

 cut into ugly walls. We repudiate as false and ridiculous the common 

 idea of the pattern-monger's book, that these aspirations of ours are 

 in any way "styles," the inventions of certain men, because we know 

 that they are based on eternal truths of Nature, free as the clouds to 

 anyone who climbs the hills and has eyes to see. 



