GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



itself. Here is the parterre of the eighteenth century landscape- 

 gardener a decorative, if formal, arrangement of flower-plots, 

 with walks of bright green turf intervening at least so it is at 

 Sion ; at Holland House and Fulham Palace these plots are 

 separated by foot-wide gravel paths, edged by high, thick borders 

 of ancient box ; but here, as there, they are intersected by one or 

 two broad, straight gravel walks running from end to end. In 

 the centre is a fountain, and a basin filled with water-lilies. 



The man, whosoever he was whether Capability Brown or 

 another who first imagined, and then laid out this beautiful 

 garden, was an artist. He knew the enormous value in every 

 picture of contrast ; and nothing more admirable in this respect 

 can be conceived than the opposition of these masses of brilliant 

 and well-harmonized flowers in the parterre, with the belt of rich, 

 dark evergreen-trees above and beyond the well-contrived alpine 

 rock-garden that shuts in this part of the grounds. 



It has always seemed to me that the man who plants even a single 

 tree does a good work and an unselfish one : he plants for posterity, 

 not for himself ; he is laying up a store of perennial beauty for 

 a world as yet unborn. The tree's maturity he himself will never 

 see, nay, nor scarcely will his children see it ; for the life of a tree 

 is commensurate with the lives of generations of men.* He accepts 

 the fact and does not murmur, for in his simple way he is a prophet ; 

 he has a vision of beauty, and his oak, or his elm, may help to 

 realize it ; or, more probably, he has a vision of utility, and, 

 just as from the oaks that Evelyn planted were built the ships 

 in which Nelson fought, he is content with the knowledge that the 

 timber of his tree will be required for purposes innumerable, when 

 he himself has gone the way of all flesh. It is an act of faith and 

 of patriotism, not unworthy of comparison though the self- 

 sacrifice and the risks are immeasurably less with the faith in 

 the future, the devotion to ends that he may not live to see con- 

 summated, of the civilian who voluntarily enters the ranks of an 

 army, offering his life to his country to England, to France, to 

 Belgium, in order that, though he die, she may continue to live.* 



It is the spirit of the old-time builder. Someone who dreamt 

 a cathedral, and then planned it ; who saw the work well begun 

 and then, silently passed. The cathedral took three, four, even 



* This was written at the beginning of the great war, long before conscription was thought of. 



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