GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



workers were bound by law to employ only professional painters 

 in the more important features of the design, though they were 

 permitted to introduce flowers, grasses, and such subsidiary 

 decoration of their own invention. Morris, an artist in every other 

 respect, was not very successful when he attempted to draw 

 figures and animals, and therefore while the conventionalized flowers, 

 fruit, and so forth, are of his own designing, he left the others to 

 Burne-Jones and to Philip Webb, who had been Edmund Street's 

 senior clerk when Morris had been articled to that architect and 

 who was succeeded, in Street's office, by Norman Shaw. 



Morris thought that the house should be to the man what the 

 body is to the soul the outward and visible sign of life itself ; and 

 that was a quaint notion of his that " the garden, if not a part of 

 the house, should be in a sense the clothing of it." He never 

 graduated as an architect, he never built a house, he scarcely 

 remained any time in Street's office. It would seem that his 

 architectural knowledge " just growed," as did, by her own account, 

 the body of the original Topsy, his namesake ; he did not value 

 himself upon it, but he took real pride in his knowledge of gardening, 

 and of flowers, and fruits, and vegetables ; " we are told that he 

 knew all their ways and capabilities." 



It is this fact that renders the garden on the Upper Mall so 

 interesting to us, for though it never held the place in his affections 

 occupied by that of Kelmscott Manor, or even by that of The Red 

 House (his first residence after his marriage), still Morris, being 

 what he was, an ardent lover of nature, " of the earth and 

 the seasons and the weather, and all that grows out of it," the 

 garden on the Upper Mall and " the growth of it " could not fail 

 to bring moments of joy into his existence. 



Circumstances prevented him from residing altogether at the 

 beloved home on the Upper Thames, but he liked to think that 

 the river that ran under his windows at Hammersmith, had passed 

 the meadows, and grey gables of Kelmscott : and more than once 

 a party of summer voyagers went from one house to another by 

 water, embarking at their own door in London, and disembarking 

 in their own meadow at Kelmscott. 



Writing in 1875 to his wife, then in Italy with his daughters, 

 about the time when he took the house, he describes the situation 

 as being " certainly the prettiest in London (you may scoff at this 



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