CHAPTER V 



THE NATURALISTIC GARDEN 



WHEN we commit ourselves to any one style of 

 gardening, how much beauty must be sacrificed 

 to ignorance and prejudice! Devotees of the 

 bedding system who delight in planting their initials in parti- 

 coloured coleus on innocent lawns, or casting a hopeful anchor of 

 "dusty miller," edged with clam shells, against a terrace like a 

 railway embankment, must find their gardens fearfully fixed. To 

 such there can be no possibility of adding a favourite plant 

 throughout the season or allowing a single one to grow in a 

 natural way. 



There are, at large, gardeners without number whose sole 

 ideas of beauty out-of-doors are derived from the garish coloured 

 pictures in seedsmen's catalogues. These they toil early and 

 late to perpetrate on their employers' grounds and display them 

 with a complacent, pardonable pride that is equalled only by 

 their masters' total indifference to what they do. Many a woman 

 who will weep bitter tears when the painter puts a jarring tint on 

 the wall of a room, will blindly blink at the gardener's affronts in 

 her most conspicuous door yard. When we remember that the 

 masses of our population are but lately landed immigrants, it is 

 scarcely surprising that crowds gaze with rapture upon a life-sized 

 elephant, done in uniform cactus rosettes, on the greensward of a 

 public park. But is it not astonishing when cultivated Americans, 

 even those whose houses are furnished artistically and whose 

 taste in pictures has been formed after years of study, are content 



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