338 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



coffee-pot, and while it may be well to keep any old specimens of the 

 sort when we find them, clipping is better not carried out with our 

 lovely evergreens on a large scale. 



Now and then we see attempts on the part of those having more 

 knowledge of some half-mechanical grade of decorative " design " 

 to galvanise the corpse of the topiary art. Such an idea would not 

 occur to any one knowing the many beautiful things now within our 

 reach, or by any one like a landscape painter who studies beautiful 

 forms of earth or trees or flowers, or by any lover of Nature in tree 

 or flower. Sometimes these puerilities are set into book form. For 

 one author there is no art in gardening, but cutting a tree into the 

 shape of a cocked hat is " art," and he says : 



I have no more scruple in using the scissors upon tree or shrub, where trim- 

 ness is desirable, than I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once represented 

 a virgin world ... and in the formal part of the garden my Yews should take the 

 shape of pyramids, or peacocks, or cocked hats, or ramping lions in Lincoln green, 

 or any other conceit I had a mind to, which vegetable sculpture can take. 



After reading this I thought of some of the true "vegetable 

 sculpture " that I had seen ; Reed and Lily, models in stem and leaf ; 

 the Grey Willows of Britain as lovely against our British skies as Olives 

 are in the south ; many-columned Oak groves set in seas of Primroses, 

 Cuckoo flowers and Violets ; Silver Birch woods of Northern Europe 

 beyond all grace possible in stone ; the eternal Garland of beauty that 

 one kind of Palm waves for hundreds of miles throughout the land 

 of Egypt a vein of summer in a lifeless world ; the noble Pine 

 woods of California and Oregon, like fleets of colossal masts on 

 mountain waves thought of these and many other lovely forms in 

 garden and wood, and then wondered that any one could be so blind 

 to the beauty of the natural forms of plants and trees as to write as 

 this author does. 



From the days of the Greeks to our own time, the delight of all 

 great artists has been to get as near this divine beauty as what they 

 work in permits. But this deplorable vegetable sculptor's delight is in 

 distorting beautiful forms ; and this in the one art in which we have 

 the happiness of possessing the living things themselves, and not 

 merely representations of them. The old people from whom he 

 takes his ideas were not so foolish, as when the Yew was used as a 

 hedge or was put at a garden gate it was necessary to clip it to keep 

 it in bounds. Apart from the ugliness of the cocked-hat tree or other 

 pantomimic trees, the want of life and change in a garden made up 

 of such trees, one would think, should open the eyes of any one to 

 its drawbacks, as in it there is none of the joy of spring's life, or 

 summer's crown of flowers, or winter's rest. 



The plea that such work gives variety does not hold, because 



