INTRODUCTORY 5 



political position has become assured, and her trade prosperous, 

 does she turn her mind to the refinements and elegances of life. 

 And of them none afford a surer means of gauging advance, 

 or a more delightful task, than to note the development of 

 gardening. It is scarcely too much to say that advancement 

 towards the higher stages of civilisation may be determined by 

 evolution of gardens. 



Of all the arts it is the least ostentatious. Painters, musi- 

 cians, poets, and especially actors, are, by the character of their 

 work, all tempted to make it proclaim their own abilities or 

 attributes of person. Who does not notice with regret a 

 present-day tendency among painters ? Picture after picture, 

 instead of revealing a love and reverence for nature, scouts 

 any such triviality, and shouts aloud for applause of a mere- 

 tricious and blatant dexterity. Not so the gardener. He 

 deals with living and growing objects. He paints with nature's 

 colours, and his effects are bound by her laws. The technique 

 of his art, being limited to selecting, preparing and planting 

 subjects for nature to work on, affords little or no opportunity 

 for personal display. 



In the story of every great nation in the past, in the 

 marvellously complex life of to-day, horticulture has always 

 had a part. Like all other arts and refinements it has moved, 

 in the main, from east to west, though during their almost 

 fabulous adventures in the sixteenth century, both Cortes in 

 Mexico and Pisarro in Peru, found a high state of cultivation 

 and elaborate systems of irrigation and hillside terracing, 

 which must have existed for hundreds of years. Whether 

 it came there from Europe or Asia is still a matter for 

 conjecture. In India, Cashmere and especially China, a 

 highly developed art of horticulture has been practised from 

 time immemorial. And in Japan the traditions of many 

 centuries have gradually built up a code of laws for an 

 intensely finished and symbolical style of minute landscape- 

 gardening, which during the last few years has attracted 

 much attention in England, and has exercised no little in- 

 fluence over western ideas. In Babylon and Persia there 



