THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



in despair. Yet there may be real pictures in gardens ; it is not a 

 mere question of patterns of a very poor sort, but one of light and 

 shade, beauty of form, and colour. In times when gardens were 

 made by men who did not know one tree from another, the matter 

 was settled by the shears it was a question of green walls only. 

 Now we are beginning to see that there is a wholly different and 

 higher order of beauty to be found in gardens, and we are at the 

 beginning of a period when we may hope to get much more pleasure 

 and instruction out of this art than ever before. 



We have seen in Bond-street a variety of picture exhibitions 

 devoted to gardens, generally of the trifling stippled water-colour 

 order. The painters of these pictures, for the most part ten-minute 

 sketches, have one main idea that the only garden worth picturing is 

 the shorn one, and pictures of such places are repeated time after 

 time ; a clipped line of Arbor-vitae, with a stuffed peacock stuck by 

 t the side of it, is considered good enough for a garden picture. Work 

 of this kind, which is almost mechanical, is so much easier than the 

 drawing of a garden with the elements of varied beauty in it. In 

 the work of Alfred Parsons and a few others we see the beginning of 

 things of beauty in the painting of gardens, but it is for us gardeners 

 to commence by first being artists ourselves, and opening our eyes to 

 see the ugly things about us. 



Artists of real power would paint gardens and home landscapes if 

 there were real pictures to draw ; but generally they are so rare that 

 the work does not come into the artist's view at all. Through all 

 the rage of the " bedding-out " fever, it was impossible for an artist 

 to paint in a garden like those which disfigured the land from Blair 

 Athol to the Crystal Palace. It is difficult to imagine Corot sitting 

 down to paint the Grande Trianon, or the terrace patterns at Versailles, 

 though a poor hamlet in the North of France, with a few willows 

 near, gave him a lovely picture. Once, when trying to persuade 

 Mr. Mark Fisher, the landscape painter, to come into a district 

 remarkable for its natural beauty, he replied : " There are too many 

 gentlemen's places there to suit my work," referring to the hardness 

 and ugliness of the effects around most country seats, owing to the 

 iron-bound pudding-clumps of trees, railings, capricious clippings and 

 shearings, bad colours, and absence of fine and true form, with, almost 

 certainly, an ugly house in the midst of all. But we ought to be able 

 to do better than be makers of garden scarecrows to the very men 

 who would enjoy our work most, and delight in painting it, rich as 

 we are in the sources of all beauty of tree or flower, and the three 

 illustrations in this chapter prove at least that in both cottage, to\vn ; 

 and castle garden, we can get away from geometrical form into 

 freedom of grace and leaf, flower and tree. 



