THE AMERICAN FLOWER GARDEN 



CHAPTER I 



THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN NATURE AND ART 



WITH praiseworthy zeal men devote their lives to 

 depicting nature with paint on canvas; other men 

 as patiently toil to reproduce her beauty of form in 

 bronze or chiselled marble; and, if they possess the vision of genius, 

 all the world concedes both to be artists, however artificial the media 

 for expressing their ideals, however lifeless their finished productions. 

 But what of the man who no less faithfully devotes his days 

 and nights to the study of nature and collaborates with her in the 

 production of living pictures ? The landscape gardener, by unit- 

 ing his imagination, artistic impulse and will to nature herself, 

 utilising natural media for the expression of his artistic feeling, 

 would seem to have gone a step beyond either the painter or the 

 sculptor, yet why is the term artist so rarely, so grudgingly applied 

 to him ? Is it not that, in the perfection of his art, he well-nigh 

 obliterates the trace of it? For 



" This is an art 



Which doth mend nature, change it rather, but 

 The art itself is nature." 



Even Shakespeare, with the majority, forgets to give the gar- 

 dener his due, ascribing all praise to his silent partner. 



In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are paintings 

 and statuary by artists whose names are household words in all 

 civilised lands. Surrounding the museum is a great pleasure 



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