A GARDEN DIARY 85 
imagination defective, but that over and above 
all this we have in most cases not the faintest 
idea of what we are aiming at. With no 
clear vision of what we propose ultimately to 
produce, how in the name of reason can we 
hope to produce it, or anything else worth 
having ? 
The cause of the mischance in nine cases 
out of ten lies in the fact that we attempt too 
much. Our original combination may have been 
good, but we want to make it still better. Our 
gold gets overgilt; our lilies are painted till 
they almost cease to be lilies at all, and the 
result is failure all along the line. This sounds 
the reverse of encouraging, but I am not sure 
but what it is in some respects better that it 
should be so. I suspect that all gardeners— 
professionals and amateurs, experts and gropers, 
—are just now rather in a state of flux and 
indecision. Two chief schools hold the field, 
and are in some respects mutually destructive 
of one another. There is the school which 
avows itself the faithful, not to say the servile, 
follower and imitator of Nature, and there is 
the school that proposes to itself to improve upon 
her. The tendency of the first is to develop a 
good deal of picturesque disorder, a pleasant, 
rather easy-going sense of repose, and possibly 
some want of definite form and colour. The 
tendency of the second, or rather of its members, 
