The Naturalistic Garden 71 



of the grounds may not be made the most interesting and 

 beautiful. It must not be supposed for a moment, however, that 

 a successful informal garden can be made haphazard. Not only 

 must the place as a whole, be planned carefully, but each bit of 

 planting, no matter how small, needs to be carefully thought out. 

 Every one knows that more skill and a finer artistic sense 

 are required by a landscape painter than by a mechanical 

 draughtsman. 



When the gardener, like the painter, studies the natural 

 landscape, he learns how effectively nature breaks the sky line 

 with tree tops; how she fringes her woodland with small trees and 

 masses of high and low shrubbery in gently flowing outlines; 

 how she clothes with kind verdure the raw banks and other scars 

 of men's making, draping them with vines, scattering little bushes 

 and plants over them until their ugliness is healed. Nature 

 insists upon beauty. Her disciple learns that she has plants for 

 every place and purpose, and that even on a small home area, 

 he, too, may grow a great variety of them in a free and picturesque 

 way, giving to each the situation where its peculiar needs may 

 best be met and its beauty be displayed to the greatest advantage 

 while adding to the effect of the garden picture as a whole. He 

 cannot see a little stream without longing to plant a phalanx of 

 Japanese irises along the edges, or clumps of feathery ferns or 

 tufts of English primroses and daisies, or sheets of blue forget- 

 me-nots on its banks. He knows that the deliciously fragrant 

 clethra and white azalea bushes would be quite happy among the 

 red-berried alder and elder flowers on the margin of his little lake 

 where willows and white birches have already made themselves at 

 home. A bit of well-drained land that has nothing to fear from cattle 

 or a mowing machine, instantly suggests to his mind naturalising 



