20 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



at the top, and the sharp green angles cutting horrible capers from 

 various points of view, and this perhaps in the face of a beautiful 

 landscape. Of this there was, until lately, an instance at Verdley 

 Place, in the midst of one of the most beautiful landscapes in 

 England, and many others might be named in almost every county. 



A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful 

 scene of the cultivated earth, all the more so if there be an artistic 

 garden the rarest thing to find ! The union between the house 

 beautiful and the ground near it a happy marriage it should be is 

 worthy of more thought than it has had in the past, and the best 

 way of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and 

 more as our cities grow larger and our lovely English landscape 

 shrinks back from them. We have never yet got from the garden 

 and the home landscape half the beauty which we might get by 

 abolishing the needless patterns which disfigure so many gardens. 

 Formality is often essential to the plan of a garden but never to the 

 arrangement of its flowers or shrubs, and to array these in rigid 

 lines, circles, or patterns can only be ugly wherever it may be ! 



After we have settled the essential approaches and levels around 

 a house, the natural form or lines of the earth itself are in nearly all 

 cases the best to follow, and it is often well to face any labour to get the 

 ground back into its natural grade where it is disfigured by ugly or 

 needless banks, lines, or angles. But in the true Italian garden on the 

 hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth, or " terrace it," 

 because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or stand at ease 

 upon it, and in such ground the strictly formal is as right as the lawn is 

 in a garden in the Thames valley. But the lawn is the heart of the 

 true English garden, and as essential to it as the terrace to the gardens 

 on the steep hills, and English lawns have been too often destroyed 

 for plans ruinous both to the garden and the home landscape. Some- 

 times on level ground the terrace walls cut off the landscape from 

 the house, and, on the other hand, the house from the landscape ! 



We may get every charm of a garden and every use of a country 

 place without sacrificing the picturesque or beautiful ; there is no 

 reason, either in the working or design of gardens, why there should 

 be a false line in them ; every charm of the flower garden may be 

 secured by wholly avoiding the knots and scrolls which subordinate 

 all the plants and flowers of a garden, all its joy and life, to a 

 wretched conventional design. The true way is the opposite. With 

 only the simplest plans to insure good working, we should see the 

 flowers and feel the beauty of plant forms, and secure every scrap of 

 turf wanted for play or lawn, and for every enjoyment of a garden. 



Time and Gardens. Time's effect on gardens is one of the 

 main considerations. Fortress-town and castle moat are now without 



