XII 

 GARDEN PATHS 



You can get no symbol finer than a path, no symbol 

 is more used. Of necessity a path must begin some- 

 where and have a destination. Of necessity it must 

 cross certain country, overcome obstacles, or go round 

 them. By nature you come at new views from a path 

 and so obtain fresh suggestions. A path entails labour, 

 and by labour ease. It must have a purpose, and so 

 must originate in an inspiration. And yet the man 

 who makes a path ignores, as a rule, the high importance 

 of his task. 



It is a peculiar thing that paths made across fields, 

 and made by the very people whose business it is to 

 reach from point to point in the shortest possible time, 

 are never straight. Their very irregularities reflect 

 the nature of man more than the nature of the ground 

 they cross. 



So unmethodical is man by instinct that if he were 

 to lay out a garden in the same frame of mind in which 

 he crosses a field, that garden would abound in twisted, 

 tortuous paths, beds of irregular shapes, spasmodic 

 arrangements of trees, flowers, shrubs and vegetables, 

 a veritable hotch-potch. To overcome that he im- 

 prisons the wanderings of his mind, divides his garden 

 into regular shapes, and drives his paths pell-mell 

 from point to point as straight as his eye and a line 

 will allow him. This^planning of a garden is an absorb- 



220 



