76 THE PARKS AND GAEDBNS OP PAEIS. [Chap. IV. 



in the gardens of such countries. These must be our storehouse 

 for material ; these, in a sense, the spring of our right feeling as 

 regards arrangement. Therefore no man can be a true landscape- 

 gardener unless he has a fair knowledge of the flora of these 

 countries — the plant-inhabitants of wood and copse, of rock and 

 meadow. Not less needful for him is a certain amount of educa- 

 tional trayel : as his highest duty and pleasute must ever be the 

 planting of beautiful trees so as to allow them to attain fullest 

 vigour and express their highest beauty, he must study them in 

 their own homes to do them justice in our gardens. The cha- 

 racter and associations of a tree are not easily understood by 

 those who have not seen it in its native country ; therefore every 

 landscape-gardener should see the natural mountain woods of 

 Europe, as well as her forests; should see the rich and varied 

 treasures of the woods in Eastern America, the giant Pines on 

 the great western ranges, and take advantage of every oppor- 

 tunity to see the natural forest and copse vegetation of the 

 northern world. To travel southward would be a benefit, too, 

 but it is not essential. If only as the best way of noting beautiful 

 or suggestive scenes observed in his travels, the power of sketch- 

 ing faithfully and rapidly should be possessed by every landscape- 

 gardener. It is, however, otherwise essential in his profession. 

 Beyond sketching, his artistic ambition should not soar ; it is his 

 privilege to make ever-changing pictures out of Nature's own 

 materials— sky and trees, and water and flowers and grass. If 

 he would not prefer this to painting in pigments, he has no 

 business to be a landscape-gardener. But most essential of all 

 for him is garden-travel. He ought to know fairly well what 

 others have done and are doing in landscape-gardening. Years 

 might be profitably employed in visiting gardens, not one of 

 them without some feature instructive for the garden-artist. Yet 

 bad design has been so much the rule that good models are most 

 rare. At present it is absolutely necessary to see hundreds of 

 gardens before one gets a clear all-round idea of what good 

 design actually is. Many places for years praised as models are 

 really examples of what to avoid. But we have to thank accident, 

 diversity of surface, peculiar individual taste, and sometimes what 

 is called neglect, for so neutralising the efi'orts of the geometrical 

 designer, for centuries, that it is yet possible for the independent 



