20 BOOK OF THE SCENTED GARDEN 
What pictures eighteenth and nineteenth-century 
artists, Birket Foster and many others, used to draw of 
flower-girded and creeper-wreathed cottages and garden 
houses of their times! Even to-day as it were Mrs 
Allingham has kept up these traditions and has given us 
charming glimpses of gardens, Carlyle’s at Chelsea with 
the man himself, and delightful cottage gardens, sur- 
rounding red-brick houses, with sunny glimpses of 
luxuriant vegetables, heavily laden fruit trees, and 
flowers glowing brightly in the sun. 
A list, however complete, of fragrant flowers and 
leaves, would not help much in the real art of making 
a sweet-scented garden. It must be an evolution or 
real growth, an individual development, and not a mere 
suggestion, or copy of a garden elsewhere. A _ real 
garden is quite as much a work of art as is a statue, a 
picture, or a book, and so far should be an original 
creation; no one can make a garden so well as can many 
of those who are to live in it or near it for at least 
some considerable portion of the year. Public parks and 
gardens, only to be seen now and then by visitors, are 
often made bizarre and glaring or intricate and profuse, 
to please all sorts and conditions of visitors, most of 
whom are without art principles or refined judgment of 
their own. Brilliant colour effects and violent contrasts 
that pass muster in public places, are often quite fatal 
to all quiet and repose in private gardens. Of course 
the same is true as between the shelters, bandstands, 
and garden-houses of the parks. That they are con- 
venient at times may be true, but they lack much that 
we expect to find in good private places. 
But we must return to the garden house, by saying 
it may be anything in size from Uncle Toby’s sentry- 
box to a tithe barn, indeed an old barn or stable may 
now and then be transformed into a garden-house with 
the best of results. In one case I know of, an old and 
