22 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



further use, where in old days gardens were set within the walls. To 

 keep all that remains of such gardens should be our first care never 

 to imitate them now. Many are far more beautiful than the modern 

 gardens, which by a wicked perversity have been kept bare of plants 

 or flower life. At one time it was rash to make a garden away from 

 protecting walls ; but when safety came from civil war, then arose 

 the often beautiful Elizabethan house, free from all moat or trace 

 of war. 



In those days the extension of the decorative work of the house 

 into the garden had some novelty to carry it off, while the kinds of 

 evergreens were very much fewer than now. Hence if the old 

 gardeners wanted an evergreen hedge or bush of a certain height, 

 they clipped a Yew tree to the form and size they wanted. Not- 

 withstanding this, we have no evidence that anything like the flat 

 monotony often seen in our own time existed then. To-day the 

 ever-growing city, pushing its hard face over our once beautiful land, 

 should make us wish more and more to keep such beauty of the earth 

 as may be still possible to us, and the horrible railway embankments, 

 where once were the beautiful suburbs of London, cry to us to save 

 all we can save of the natural beauty of the earth. 



Architecture and Flower Gardening^ The architect is a good 

 gardener when he makes a beautiful house. Whatever is to be done 

 or considered afterwards, one is always helped and encouraged by its 

 presence ; while, on the other hand, scarcely any amount of skill in 

 gardening softens the presence of an ugly building. No one has 

 more reason to rejoice at the presence of good architecture than the 

 gardener and planter, and all stonework near the house, even in the 

 garden, should be dealt with by the architect. 



But when architecture goes beyond the strictly necessary round 

 the house, and seeks to replace what should be a living garden by an 

 elaborate tracery on the ground, then error and waste are at work, and 

 the result is ugliness. The proof of this is at Versailles, at the 

 Crystal Palace in great part, in the old gardens in Vienna, and at 

 Caserta, near Naples, where there is a far from beautiful stone garden. 

 One may not so freely mention private places as public ones, but 

 many ugly and extravagant things have been done by trying to adapt 

 a mode of garden design essential in a country like Italy, where 

 people often lived for health's sake on tops of the hills, to gardens 

 in the plains and valleys of England. I know a terrace in England 

 built right against the house, so as to exclude the light from, and 

 make useless, what were once the reception rooms. That deplorable 

 result came about by endeavouring to adapt Italian modes to English 

 conditions, and was the work of Sir Charles Barry. To any one 



1 Rc;ul before the Architectural Association on Friday, December 16, 1893. 



