GARDEN DESIGN, 



79 



all the needs of the ground, whereas in 

 really old times it was not so. Berke- 

 ley was not the same as Sutton, and 

 Sutton quite different from Haddon. 



Moreover, on top of all this for- 

 mality of design was grafted the most 



formal and inartistic 

 Patterns of f arranging 



flowers and J o o 



carpet* beds flowers that ever came 



things of our - h h j f 



own times. # ' 



ways that were happily 

 unknown to the Italians or the makers 

 of the earliest terraced gardens. The 

 true Italian gardens were often beau- 

 tiful with trees in their natural forms, 

 as in the Giusti gardens at Verona ; 

 but bedding out, or marshalling the 

 flowers in stiff lines and geometrical 

 patterns is entirely a thing of our own 

 precious time, and "carpet" garden- 

 ing is simply a further remove in ugli- 

 ness. The painted gravel gardens of 

 Nesfield and Barry and other broken- 

 brick gardeners were also an attempt 

 to get rid of the flowers and get rigid 

 formality instead, as in the Florticul- 

 tural Society's garden at South Ken- 

 sington. Part of the garden architect's 

 scheme was to forbid the growth of 

 plants on walls, as at Shrubland, where, 

 for many years, there were strict orders 

 that the walls were not to have a flower 

 or a creeper of any kind upon them. 

 As these pattern gardens were made 

 by persons often ignorant of garden- 

 ing, and if planted in any human way 

 with flowers would all "go to pieces," 

 hence the idea of setting them out as 

 they appeared on the drawing-board, 

 some of the beds not more than a foot 

 in diameter, blue and yellow paints be- 



Loss of old 

 garden ways. 



ing used where the broken brick and 

 stone did not give the desired colour ! 

 (I am not writing farce, having had 

 the labour of removing some of these 

 garden "architects' efforts.") 



Side by side with the adoption in 

 most large and show places of the 

 patterned garden, both 

 in design and plant- 

 ing, disappeared almost 

 everywhere the old English garden, 

 that is, one with a variety of form of 

 shrub and flower and even low trees ; 

 so that now we only find this kind of 

 garden here and there in Cornwall, 

 Ireland, and Scotland, and on the 

 outskirts of country towns. All true 

 plant form was banished because it did 

 not fit into the bad carpet pattern ! I 

 am only speaking of what everyone 

 must know who cares the least about 

 the subject, and of what can be seen 

 to-day in all the public gardens round 

 London and Paris ; even Kew, with 

 the vast improvement of late years, 

 has not emancipated itself from this 

 formal way of flower planting, as we 

 see there, in front of the palm-house, 

 purple beet marshalled in patterns. 

 But we shall never see beautiful flower 

 gardens again until natural ways of 

 grouping flowers and variety of true 

 form come back to us in the flower 

 garden. 



After the central error above 

 shown there comes a common one of 

 these writers, of sup- 



The Wild Garden • 1 i i 



does not take posing that those who 

 the place of the see k natural form and 



Flower-garden. . . , 



beauty in the garden 

 and home-landscape are opposed to 



G 



