DESIGN AND POSITION. 27 



natural forms. It is also an example of a fine old house around 

 which there is no terraced gardening. 



It would be as hopeless to design a building without knowing 

 anything of its uses or inhabitants as to design a garden without full 

 knowledge of its nobler ornaments trees and the many things that 

 go to make our garden flora vary so much in form, habits, and hardi- 

 ness according to soils, situations, and districts. Errors of the most 

 serious kind arise from dealing with such things without knowledge, 

 and any attempt to keep the gardener out of the garden must fail, as 

 it did in our own day in the case of the broken brick and stone flower 

 beds at South Kensington. Except for what is mostly a very small 

 area near the house, the architect and garden-designer deal with 

 distinct subjects and wholly distinct materials. They should work 

 in harmony, but not seek to do that for which their training and 

 knowledge have not fitted them. 



On the Flower-Garden as a Show-Ground for Builders' Sculpture and other 

 Debased Forms of the Plastic "Art" "In the last century there was a manu- 

 factory of garden images in Piccadilly ; in fact, there were four. Mr. John Cheece, 

 the owner, did a splendid trade in cast lead figures gods and goddesses, nymphs 

 and shepherds, Pan with his pipes, Actaeon with his hounds, mowers, shepherd- 

 esses, and Father Time with his scythe ; these sweet suggestive figures still linger 

 rarely in old-world gardens, almost living by associations of the many that have 

 loved them." R. Blomfield (Art and Life, p. 205;. 



It is clear from the above that there are men who think of the 

 garden, not as a living picture of beautiful natural forms, but as a 

 place to show off one of the most worthless phases of human art. In 

 a northern country like ours a statue of any high merit as a work of 

 art deserves to be protected by a building of some kind. The effect 

 of frost and rain in our climate on statuary out-of-doors is very destruc- 

 tive, and the face of a statue of some merit put up only a few years 

 ago opposite the Royal Exchange is now rotted away. The scattering 

 of numerous statues of a low order of merit, or of no merit at all, 

 which we see in some Italian gardens, often gives a bad effect, and the 

 dotting of statues about both the public gardens of Paris and London 

 is destructive of all repose. If a place be used for the exhibition of 

 sculpture, well and good ; but let us not in that case call it a garden. 

 In Britain statues are often of plaster material, and those who use a 

 garden as a place to dot about such " works of art " do not think of 

 the garden as the best of places to show the work of Nature, and as 

 one in which we should see many fine natural forms. 



The earliest recollection I have of any large garden or country seat 

 was one strewn with the remains of statues, but as my evidence as to 

 effect and endurance might not be thought impartial, we may call as 

 a witness Victor Cherbuliez, of the French Academy. 



" It was one of those classical gardens the planners of which prided themselves 

 upon as being able to give Nature lessons in good behaviour, to teach her geometry 



