7 8 FLORA AND SYLVA, 



GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT * 



Of all the things made by man for 

 his pleasure a flower garden has the 

 least business to be ugly, barren, or 

 stereotyped, because in it we may 

 have the fairest of the earth's children 

 in a living, ever-changeful state, and 

 not, as in other arts, mere representa- 

 tions of them. And yet we find in 

 nearly every country place, pattern 

 plans, conventional design, and the 

 garden robbed of all life and grace by 

 setting out flowers in geometric ways. 

 Among the recent writers on garden 

 design, one tells us that the gardener's 

 knowledge is of no account, and that 

 gardens 



should never have been allowed to fall into the 

 hands of the gardener or out of those of the archi- 

 tect ; that it is an architectural matter, and should 

 have been schemed at the same time and by the 

 same hand as the house itself. 



The chief error he makes is that 

 people, whom he calls "landscapists," 

 destroyed all the for- 

 Formai gardens ma l gardens in Eng- 



madc in our , i 1 1 



own day. l an d, and that they 

 had their ruthless way 

 until his coming. A more extrava- 

 gant statement could not be made, 

 as must be clear to any one who takes 

 the least trouble to look into the thing 

 itself, which many of these writers 

 will not do or regard the elementary 

 facts of what they write about. So 

 far from its being true, many of the 

 most formal gardens in England have 

 been made within the past century, 

 when this writer says all his ideal gar- 

 dens were cleared away. The Crys- 

 tal Palace, the Royal Horticultural 



Society's garden at Kensington, Shrub- 

 land, Witley Court, Castle Howard, 

 Mentmore, Drayton, Crewe Hall, Al- 

 ton Towers, and scores of pretentious 

 places. During the whole of that pe- 

 riod there was hardly a country seat 

 laid out that was not marred by the 

 idea of a garden as a conventional and 

 patterned thing. So far from formal 

 gardens being abolished, as the Irish 

 peasant said when denouncing absen- 

 tees, "the country is full of them!" 

 With Castle Howards, Trenthams, 

 and Chatsworths staring at him, it is 

 ludicrous to see a young architect 

 weeping over their loss. Even when 

 there is no money to waste in walls 

 and gigantic water squirts the idea of 

 the terrace is still carried out often in 

 plains and other wrong positions in 

 the shape of green banks often one 

 above the other, as if they were an 

 artistic treat. There are hundreds of 

 such gardens about the country, and 

 the ugliest and most formally set out 

 and planted gardens ever made in Eng- 

 land have been made in Victorian days 

 when, we are told by writers who do 

 not look into the facts of the thing 

 itself, all these things were lost. 



It cannot be too clearly remem- 

 bered that " formal gardens of the 

 worst and most deplorable type are 

 things of our own time, and it is only 

 in our own time the common idea 

 that there is only one way of making 

 a garden was spread. Hence, in all 

 the newer houses we see the stereo- 

 typed garden often made in spite of 



* Reprinted, with additions, from the National Review. 



