CHAPTER V 

 WATER GARDENS 



We can excel England on water-lilies, but have much to learn from 

 her about design, arrangement, taste 



WHAT we Americans strive hardest for in gardening, and 

 oftenest miss, is what J. M. Barrie in one of his plays 

 calls "that damned charm" ; yet the surest, and some- 

 times the least expensive, way of winning this supreme prize 

 is to have a water garden. There are two reasons for this: 

 First, vegetation cannot help attaining luxuriance by the water 

 side, and without luxuriance there can be no charm. So, even 

 if a person makes every possible mistake in selecting, arranging, 

 and cultivating water plants, he cannot help getting some 

 luxuriance, at least in spots. 



In the second place, water possesses an inherent charm which 

 cannot be wholly destroyed even by making a stream muddy or 

 lining it with dump heaps. So, even if we fret the water with 

 visions of bad or inappropriate architecture (as Japanese tea 

 houses, Dutch windmills, and highly coloured boat houses usually 

 are), our friends may still refrain from handing our names to the 

 "Society for the Suppression of Bad Taste." You cannot say 

 this of ordinary, or land, gardening. 



Let us try, then, to explain this charm of water, for if we 

 cannot analyze it, how can we hope to reproduce it? What, for 

 instance, is there about the water in these pictures that pleases 

 you? "The shadows," some will answer, who look at the poplars 



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