CHAPTER III. 



VARIOUS FLOWER GARDENS, MAINLY CHOSEN FOR THEIR 

 BEAUTY ; COTTAGE GARDENS IN KENT AND SOMERSET ; 

 MOUNT USHER ; GREENLANDS ; GOLDER'S HILL ; PENDELL 

 COURT ; RHIANVA ; SHEEN COTTAGE ; DRUMMOND CASTLE ; 

 PENSHURST ; COMPTON WINYATES ; KETTON COTTAGE ; POWIS ; 

 COTEHELE ; EDGE HALL ; SHRUBLAND ; CHILLINGHAM ; 

 BULWICK ; OFFINGTON ; WILTON ; STONELANDS, AND OTHERS. 



THESE gardens should help us to get the most precious lesson as 

 to design that the best-laid-out garden is that which is best 

 fitted for its situation, soil and climate, and without much considera- 

 tion as to any " style." Once we make a rule and say, this is the best 

 and only way, it is not only the good architect, and that still rarer 

 being, the good landscape gardener, who will carry it out, but any- 

 body who has any influence in building or gardening will do the same 

 thing in all sorts of positions with any kind of material, including the 

 " young man in the office " and other persons who have never even 

 given the slightest thought to any kind of artistic planting, let alone 

 any serious study of garden design. Of the expression of this 

 inartistic ruling we see painful evidence everywhere in the terraces 

 like railway banks out of place and rampant through the land. On 

 these stereotyped ideas is based another leading to greater evil, 

 which is that, once you have got your patterned plateau, you cannot 

 have your flowers in artistic or picturesque ways on it, and so the poor 

 gardener has to go on trying to adapt ugly patterns in flowers to the 

 ugly plan that is given him. The second idea is false too, as flowers 

 may be arranged in right and natural ways in any garden, but that 

 fact has not killed the common error that we cannot throw formality 

 overboard in arranging flowers. 



The really artistic way is to have no preconceived idea of any 

 style, but in all cases to be led by the ground itself and by the many 

 things upon it. Why should we in the plains or gentle meadows of 



