THE HOUSE AND THE GARDEN 



THERE is a close connexion between the art of 

 gardening and the art of house-building, and 

 that connexion persists even when deliberate efforts 

 are made to break it. Beautiful houses made the 

 beautiful formal gardens of the seventeenth and earlier 

 centuries. Ugly houses made the landscape gardens 

 of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is char- 

 acteristic of the Englishman that, when he despaired 

 of making his house beautiful he should not have 

 despaired of making his garden beautiful; or, rather, 

 that when he was content with an ugly house, and per- 

 suaded that in some way its ugliness was appropriate 

 to his own wants and expressive of his own ideas, 

 he should not have been content with the same kind 

 of ugliness in his garden. About the house he was 

 ready to believe what architects told him; but he 

 would no longer trust them with his garden, and thus 

 there came into being the landscape garden designer, 

 whose aim it was to make his client forget the existence 

 of his house the moment he walked into his garden. 

 Here, of course, there was a divorce between the art 

 of gardening and the art of house-building; but it 

 came about because the art of house-building ceased 

 to express any of the true feelings or better qualities 



of the householder, because it misrepresented him to 



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