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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