Formal Gardening 



where Nature has prepared for his work. 

 Each and every new problem needs new 

 consideration. Each, as Andre says, " needs 

 individual taste, the touch of the artist, who 

 should above all be guided by art, and who 

 often will have to struggle against the exac- 

 tions of his client and against his own ten- 

 dency to give free course to that will-o'-the- 

 wisp which is so difficult to fetter — the im- 

 agination.*' 



And Emerson tells us the same thing in 

 his own trenchant fashion: ^^It is best to 

 pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to 

 buy good sense applied to gardening.'* We 

 shall never be well served by theories that 

 this style is right and this is wrong, that 

 one method of treatment or one kind of 

 feature is beautiful, and other methods, other 

 features, are inartistic. We shall be well 

 served only by good sense, taking account 

 of particular local facts, and based upon 

 principles which themselves are based upon 

 the same great laws that direct intelligent 

 effort in all the other arts. Simplicity, 

 harmony, appropriateness, variety in unity 

 — clear expressions of clearly conceived and 



187 



