Faults in Gardening 



gardens, would here look slovenly and 

 untidy. The beauty our cultivators prize 

 is that of neatness and compactness. Na- 

 ture gives us this in spring — the very 

 season when we are most careless about 

 our grounds — and we try to produce it in 

 the summer-time, which was intended for 

 a looser and freer growth. It is scarcely 

 needful to dwell longer on this head. 

 There are people even now so unfeeling 

 as to clip their trees into the form of foun- 

 tains and peacocks, and we sometimes see a 

 bed of much-prized flowers so embarrassed 

 with pots, hoops, sticks, and matting, that 

 our interest in the flowers is destroyed — 

 they seem like the inmates of a prison. 

 But most people see the wrong of this, and 

 the favourite flowers of the day are hardly of 

 the kind which need it. It is singular how 

 little a highly artificial treatment of certain 

 plants will displease us, where things grow 

 freely as a whole. I n a well-stocked kitchen 

 garden how little we are annoyed by the 

 fantastic shapes into which fruit-trees are 

 often cut ; we pass them over like an ill- 

 shaped tree or unsightly fence in the open 

 country, amid the fulness of unembarrassed 

 life. And the forms of the kitchen vege- 

 tables — rhubarb, asparagus, and cabbage 

 — are generally so magnificent. 

 "5 



