HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 



dashed with its complementary yellow ; and of its shape he 

 learns nothing at all ! The artist-monk in his mediaeval cloister, 

 illuminating his missal or his breviary with loving patience and 

 skill, in the long hours between matins and compline, did more 

 for the rose and the lily when, mixed with gold-leaf, he introduced 

 them into his borders than Shakespeare and Spenser have done 

 for he indicated their shape and their colour. 



And words are unreliable, as well as inadequate ; because, in 

 process of time, their signification may change. Damask with us 

 means dark red ; with the Elizabethans (who were not colour- 

 blind) it meant pink ; for their poets, one and all, describe a 

 maiden's cheek as " damask." 



The beautiful rose-walk at the north side of Holland House was, 

 when I saw it, lined with roses that were pink, not crimson. Had 

 Scott so seen them from his bedroom window and described them 

 in Spenserian terms, he would have called their colour " damask." 

 It all resolves itself into this a splash of colour quite rightly 

 chosen, and deftly laid on by a trained hand, will better convey the 

 beauty of a natural scene than whole pages of descriptive poetry, 

 or prose. 



The things that make for beauty in open landscape, when land- 

 scape is left to itself, do so equally in a garden ; but there, alas, 

 discords blatant and unnecessary ones are too frequently de- 

 liberately encouraged by an arrangement of planting of which 

 Nature would be ashamed, and so much so that she would pro- 

 ceed at once to rectify, or conceal her error in taste. She is a 

 wonderful and artful pacifist. By means of play of light and 

 shadow, by notes of colour, accidentally struck, and by the free use 

 of her own glorious sunshine, she brings discords into perfect 

 harmony : and the eye trained to harmony in colour is as sensitive 

 as the ear attuned to harmony in music, and much more frequently 

 suffers, because more people are taught to detect discord in sound 

 than in colour. Unfortunately, Nature cannot always interfere in 

 a garden, for there man is responsible. Nevertheless, she does 

 what she can, as I can testify from my personal and recent ex- 

 perience. In the garish noontide of a most glorious May, my 

 windows, facing east, looked out on a trim little garden, gay with 

 masses of wallflowers, mostly yellow ; and immediately beyond 

 were two well-grown hawthorns of the scentless, double-blossomed, 



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