CHAPTER XXIV. 



COLOUR IN THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



ONE of the first things which all who care for gardens should 

 learn, is the difference between true and delicate and ugly colour 

 between the showy dyes and much glaring colour seen in gardens 

 and the beauties and harmonies of natural colour. There are, apart 

 from beautiful flowers, many lessons and no fees : Oak woods in 

 winter, even the roads and paths and rocks and hedgerows ; leaves in 

 many hues of life and death, the stems of trees : many birds are 

 lovely studies in harmony and delicate gradation of colour ; the 

 clouds (eternal mine of divinest colour) in many aspects of light, and 

 the varied and infinite beauty of colour of the air itself as it comes 

 between us and the distant view. 



Nature is a good colourist, and if we trust to her guidance we 

 never find wrong colour in wood, meadow, or on mountain. " Laws " 

 have been laid down by chemists and decorators about colours which 

 artists laugh at, and to consider them is a waste of time. If we 

 have to make coloured cottons, or to " garden " in coloured gravels, 

 then it is well to think what ugly things will shock us least ; but 

 dealing with living plants in their infinitely varied hues, and with 

 their beautiful flowers, is a different thing ! If we grow well plants 

 of good colour, all will be right in the end, but often raisers 

 of flowers work against us by the raising of flowers of bad 

 colour. The complicated pattern beds so often seen in flower gardens 

 should be given up in favour of simpler beds, of the shapes best 

 suiting the ground, and among various reasons for this is to get true 

 colour. When we have little pincushion-beds where the whole 

 " pattern " is seen at once through the use of dwarf plants, the desire 

 comes to bring in colour in patterns and in ugly ways. For this 

 purpose the wretched Alternanthera and other pinched plant rubbish 

 are grown plants not worth growing at all. 



When dwarf flowers are associated with bushes like Roses, and 

 with plants like Carnations and tall Irises, having pointed and grace- 

 ful foliage, the colours are relieved against the delicate foliage of 



