CHAPTER XVI 
THE MAKING OF FLOWER PICTURES 
THERE is a particularly appealing sentence in 
Miss Jekyll’s “Colour in Flower Gardens.” This 
reads: “It seems to me that the duty we owe to 
our gardens and to our own bettering in our gar- 
dens is so to use the plants that they shall form 
beautiful pictures.” Her ideal is “gardening that 
may rightly claim to rank as a fine art.” 
No garden ideal could be finer. Unfortunately 
none is more difficult of attainment, in the complete 
sense that Miss Jekyll has in mind. In gardens, as 
elsewhere, “‘art is long,” but likewise “‘time is fleet- 
ing’’—there are other things to do. Most must 
be content with shooting the arrow high, the while 
they take a grain of comfort in the thought that 
though they will inevitably fail to reach the mark 
they will have something, and be the better, for the 
striving. 
So these “beautiful pictures,” even if for long 
they may exist only as insubstantial visions, ought 
to be the inspiration of the humblest as well as the - 
grandest of garden schemes. While not essential, 
save to the highly sensitized nature, they do put a 
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