300 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



be possible to attain that object, and to arrange that no 

 month should be without its brightening flowers. 



" The daughters of the year 

 One after one thro' that still garden passed ; 

 Each, garlanded with her peculiar flower, 

 Danced into light and died into the shade." 



Tennyson. 



Mr. William Robinson's book, The Wild Garden, was first 

 published in 1881, and two years later was followed by The 

 English Flower -Gar den. These books did an immense amount 

 towards fostering the taste which was showing itself in favour 

 of hardy flowers. This idea of naturalizing plants in shrub- 

 beries, wild places, and grassy banks, and grouping them to 

 produce natural picturesque effects, was just the reverse of 

 " landscape gardening." Instead of bringing green undula- 

 tions of park-like appearance up to the house and banishing 

 the flower-garden, the art of " wild gardening " and naturalizing 

 plants which are not natives, but hardy in this climate, ex- 

 tends the flower-garden into the surrounding country. Mr. 

 Robinson called attention to the beauties, then almost for- 

 gotten, of many hardy herbaceous flowers. He suggested 

 that Iris, Meadow-sweet, Monk's-hood, Trollius, or Day-lilies, 

 were better suited to the margins of lakes than Dahlias or 

 Geraniums. He reminded people that roses. Wistaria,^ Clematis, 

 and Virginian creeper, would climb trees as easily as brick 

 walls. He pointed out that shrubberies, instead of being a 

 compact mass of bushes, could have glades and openings, filled 

 with TrilUums, Funkias, Solomon's Seal, Lily of the Valley, 

 Daffodils, Snowflakes, and Meadow saffron, or with Gentiana 

 asclepiadea, Hypericums or Lilies, or other plants that, once 

 established, could take care of themselves. Even walls, he 

 said, could be beautified by Stonecrop, Houseleeks, Cheddar 

 pinks, Corydalis lutea, and countless other things. " Mowing 

 the grass once a fortnight in pleasure-grounds, as now practised, 

 is a costly mistake," he wrote in 1881. Rather than this, he 

 exclaimed : " Let much of the grass grow till fit to cut for 

 hay, and we may enjoy in it a world of lovely flowers that will 



^ Wistaria sinensis, or Glycine chinensis, by which name it was first 

 known in this country, was only introduced in i8i6. 



