94 STUDIES IN GARDENING 



likes them to blaze against a foil of green turf. But 

 he does not understand that the contrast of greenery 

 is most beautiful when it is most closely interwoven 

 with the flowers themselves, both by means of the 

 intermixture of flowering plants with plants out of 

 flower, and also by means of the leafage of a plant 

 that is in flower. For it is only such a closely inter- 

 woven contrast that displays the full beauty of in- 

 dividual flowers and also of individual plants. In a 

 bed of Geraniums or Begonias, grown for their blaze 

 of colour, it is the colour alone that we see and think 

 of. The individual plants, the individual flowers, 

 are nothing. The beauty of the arrangement may 

 be considerable — it is absurd to pretend that all bed- 

 ding out is ugly — but it is a beauty only of masses 

 of strong colour, without form and, above all, without 

 character. Now no beauty interests us for long im- 

 less It has character. We cannot in pictures produce 

 a beauty that satisfies by means of mere abstractions. 

 The purely decorative picture, the picture that con- 

 sists merely of an arrangement of forms and coloiu'S, 

 as nearly abstract as the painter can make them and 

 put together to make an agreeable pattern — a pic- 

 ture of this kind pleases at the first glance very likely; 

 but our interest in it is quicldy exhausted, because 

 there is no character in its component parts. So 

 there is no character in the individual plants of a 

 flower-bed that is intended merely to produce a blaze 

 of colour; and in the same way our interest in such 

 a bed is exhausted after the first glance. A great 



