ART IN RELA TION TO FL WER- GARDENING. 1 1 



by Beethoven with the " Maiden's Prayer ; -" an English cottage garden, 

 quite simple in plan and full of flowers in their natural forms, with the 

 imitations of very bad carpets (vile in colour and without form) which 

 we now see in French and German watering places (mosaiculture) ! 



So far from its being true that good or bad garden design or 

 planting are merely matters of taste, the very first thing we should 

 teach to every one who has to think of it is that they are matters of 

 fact, truth and observation. The assumption in the paragraph that 

 any one advised leaving hedges, &c., to Nature does not surely need a 

 reply ; but that a Yew clipped intelligently is quite as beautiful " as a 

 well and naturally grown Yew tree " is a statement that could hardly 

 be made save in jest by any one who has thought the least about tree 

 beauty or natural form of any kind. For here it is not a difference of 

 degree we have to deal with, but a difference in kind, because a clipped 

 tree is a thing without any true form, light or shade, motion or voice. 

 Vast as are the differences above named, between none of them is 

 there so great and hideous a difference as between the divinely given 

 form of the northern evergreen tree, whether of the tree-fringed 

 mountain lawns of Jura, the mountains of the Pacific coast of North 

 America, or the rocks of Scotland, and the ridiculous results of the 

 distortion of forest trees by man. 



Yet the fact that garden design or planting is a matter of know- 

 ledge of the natural forms, harmonies and colours of things does not 

 mean that this writer or any one is not to do what he pleases in his 

 garden. But when he tells us that the judgment which enables us to 

 distinguish a good picture from a bad one is to abandon us before the 

 absurdities seen in our gardens, and too often marring the foregrounds 

 of the home landscape of our country houses, he is leading all who 

 trust him into error. Moreover, individual likes and dislikes are 

 wholly separate from the problem of what is best in a given situation 

 as to design and planting. 



The question, like so many others, is made needlessly hard for the 

 student by the writing without knowledge, which, unhappily, is 

 devoted to it. To practice an art without any knowledge of it is bad 

 enough, but when men write about an art dealing with so many living 

 things as planting, when clearly they have given no heed to its simplest 

 elements, they do infinite harm in spreading the false idea that it is all 

 " a matter of taste." Of such quotations as the above, in which every 

 phrase is an error or a false assumption, a volume might easily be put 

 together. 



One of the commonest and grossest errors is to take the worst 

 possible work, abuse it, and say nothing about the better way. 



Deception is a primary object of the landscape gardener. Thus to get variety \ and 

 to deceive the eye into supposing that the garden is larger than it zs, the paths are 



