ART IN RELATION TO FLOWER-GARDENING. 



gardener altogether, and get colour by the use of broken brick, white 

 sand, and painted stone, as in Nesfield's work at South Kensington 

 and Sir C. Barry's at Shrubland. All such work is wrong and degrad- 

 ing to the art of gardening, and in its extreme expressions is ridiculous. 

 Why are such designs bad ? The good sense of all is the final court 

 of appeal for even artistic things, and to many people these remarks 

 need not be made, but the stereotyped gardens that abound in many 

 places show us that the fight against the ugly garden has only begun. 

 The modern garden is often no more interesting than an oilcloth 

 pattern, because instead of beautiful form and colour we see emphasis 

 given to pattern-work and plants robbed of all their grace. But 

 while the artist may be driven from the common bedding garden, he 

 will perhaps go to rest his eyes on a cottage garden, and make a 

 picture of it, as the cottage garden is itself often a picture. Why 

 should the cottage garden be a picture when the gentleman's garden 

 is not ? Here is an engraving of a small cottage garden in Devon- 

 shire : an artistic garden in its simplest expression. There was very 

 little in this beyond Roses and a few Pansies, and yet it was right 

 and beautiful, and there are many as good in every county in England. 

 May the large gardens be as good in proportion to the money spent 

 upon them and their size as this little cottage garden ? Certainly : 

 the gardens shown in this book prove it, although it is rarely now- 

 adays that a large garden shows anything like the charm of simplicity 

 that many cottage gardens do. 



The gardener should follow the true artist, however modestly, in 

 his love for things as they are, in delight in natural form and beauty 

 of flower and tree, if we are to be free from barren geometry, and if 

 our gardens are ever to be pictures. The gardener has not the 

 strenuous work of eye and hand that the artist has, but he has plenty 

 of good work to do : to choose from ten thousand beautiful living 

 things ; to study their nature and adapt them to his soil and climate ; 

 to get the full expression of their beauty ; to grow and place them 

 well and in right relation to other things, which is a life-study in itself, 

 in view of the great numbers of the flowers and flowering trees of the 

 world. And as the artist's work is to see and keep for us some of the 

 beauty of landscape, tree, or flower, so the gardener's should be to keep 

 for us as far as may be, in the fulness of their natural beauty, the living 

 things themselves. The artist gives us the fair image : the gardener 

 is the trustee of a world of fair living things, to be kept with care and 

 knowledge in necessary subordination to the conditions of his work. 

 And as there is other and higher design than that of the decorator 

 of flat surfaces with patterns, so there is an absolute and eternal 

 difference between conventional form as he expresses it, and the true 

 forms of cloud or hill, vale, stream, path, oak, palm and vine, reed 



