CHAPTER XXVI. 



WALKS AND EDGINGS. 



OUR gardens are often laid out in a complex way : with so many 

 needless walks, edgings, and impediments of many kinds that work 

 cannot be done in a simple way, and half the time is lost in taking 

 care of or avoiding useless or frivolous things. Efforts thus wasted 

 should be turned tc account in the growth of flowers. In many 

 large places there is no true flower-gardening ; wretched plants 

 are stuck out in the parterre every year, and a few stunted things 

 are scratched in round the choke-muddle shrubbery, but little labour 

 or love is bestowed on the growth of flowers. In others there are 

 miles of walks bordered by bare stretches of earth, as cheerful as 

 Woking Cemetery in its early years. The gardener is impotent to 

 turn such a waste into a paradise ; his time and his thoughts are 

 often eaten up by keeping in order needless and often ugly walks. 

 The gardeners, owing to the trouble of this wasteful system, have 

 little time for true flower-gardening forming a real garden of 

 Roses, or groups of choice shrubs, or beds of Lilies, or of other 

 noble hardy plants, so that the beds may fairly nourish their tenants 

 for a dozen years. Instead of the never-ending and wearisome 

 hen-scratchings of autumn and spring, we ought to prepare one 

 portion of the flower garden or pleasure ground each year, so that 

 it will yield beauty for many years. But this cannot be done while 

 half the gardener's time is taken up with barber's work. 



Our own landscape gardeners are a little more sparing of these 

 hideous walks than the French ; but we very often have twice too 

 many walks, which torment the poor gardener by needless and stupid 

 labour. The planning of these walks in various elaborate ways 

 has been supposed to have some relation to landscape gardening ; 

 but one needless walk often bars all good effect in its vicinity. Flower- 

 beds are often best set in Grass, and those who care to see them will 

 approach them quite as readily on Grass as on hard walks. For the 

 three or four months of our winter season there is little need of 

 frequent resort to flower-beds, and for much of the rest of the year the 

 turf is better than any walk. I do not mean that there should be no 



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