THE WATER-GARDEN 259 



CHAPTER XIII 



%^e afllatec=(Bartifn 



Advice to those about to build a Water-garden — DON'T. 

 Not that the Water-garden is not a joy and a glory ; but 

 that it is cruelly hard to keep in order and control unless 

 you are master of millions and of broad ample acres of 

 pool and pond. Water, like fire, is a good servant, 

 perhaps, but is painfully liable to develop into a master. 

 As Webster's Flaminio saj's of women, water, to the 

 gardener, ' is either a god or a wolf.' How many little 

 ponds are unguardedly built, only to become mere basins 

 of slime and duckweed.? How many larger pools are 

 made, only to fill with Chara, Potamogeton, and the other 

 noxious growths that make its depths a clogged, waving 

 forest of dull brown vendure ? The fact is, a pool — not 

 an easy thing to build and set going — is of all things in 

 the garden the hardest of all to keep in decent order. 

 Some of its choice inmates devour and despoil the smaller 

 ones ; water- weeds increase and multiply at a prodigious 

 rate ; dead leaves drift thick upon it in autumn, slime 

 and green horrors uiake a film across it in summer. 



Contrast with this grim picture the water-garden as it 

 glisters before the sanguine eye of him who contemplates 

 possessing one — that crystal expanse, starred with goblets 

 of Nymphaea, those neat yet luxuriant shores aglow 

 with every glorious plant of the marsh. But the ideal 

 water -garden I need not draw from my own words. 

 The ideal water-garden has been described, once and for 



