HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
dashed with its complementary yellow; and of its shape he 
learns—nothing at all! The artist-monk in his medieval 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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