PREFACE 



as long ago as 1911 and 1912 were originally intended solely for an exhi- 

 bition of garden pictures. The exhibition was inevitably deferred, when it 

 was decided that they should first appear in book form, because the drawings 

 had to be held over for reproduction in colour. 



In its first inception, the raison d'etre of the book was purely a pictorial 

 one, and the text accompanying the pictures would therefore have been 

 merely elucidatory and descriptive. The text, in short, was to have illus- 

 trated the drawings, not, as now, vice versa. 



But alas ! in six months there followed the cosmic upheaval of the last 

 four years with the inevitable postponement or destruction of all human 

 plans and projects. In August, 1914, when I was in the full swing and 

 enjoyment of my outdoor work like a bolt from the blue the measureless 

 calamity of the Great War was upon us ! At the moment when all eyes were 

 turned to the stricken fields of France and Flanders, when, there, and else- 

 where in the wide area of strife, husbands, sons, brothers and nephews 

 heroes all, in their readiness and steadfastness, martyrs in their faith were, 

 voluntarily, paying so heavy a price for the ultimate freedom of mankind 

 none at home would have had heart or time to consider the beauty and the 

 peace of gardens and therefore the book itself was more than once post- 

 poned. 



But my own small bit of work went on. The drawings themselves were 

 ready in 1915 and in working at the text I came unexpectedly upon a 

 mine so rich that, since the unhappy prolongation of the war allowed it 

 I seized the chance to treat my subject or rather subjects for thirteen 

 different ones are dealt with much more fully. To treat it exhaustively, 

 even without reference to many interesting or beautiful metropolitan gardens 

 existing, which I have not so much as mentioned would be impossible within 

 the limits of one volume. 



And the book, even so far as it goes, is incomplete. I had purposed, as a 

 matter of course, to include a drawing of " Strawberry " the famous 

 garden of Horace Walpole, and to make more than a passing allusion to his 

 place in the history of gardening ; but much to my regret I was not permitted 

 to do so. And though facilities were kindly given me to draw in the gardens 

 of Gray's Inn, laid out, it is said, by Bacon himself, I found that they had 

 been so sorely cut up and worn by the perpetual drilling of thousands of 

 troops, that on aesthetic grounds I was compelled to leave them out. 



JESSIE MACGREGOR. 

 Swallowfield, 



October 15th, 1918. 



