DESIGN IN THE SUBURBAN GARDEN. 



69 



That there is no hard and fast rule upon which any particular garden 

 should be laid out is, I hope, obvious, and I should even dare to 

 paraphrase Kipling's ballad " In the Neolithic Age," and say, "there are 

 nine and sixty ways of constructing garden lays, and every single one 

 of them is right," so long as we keep before us the spirit of the old 

 English garden, and understand the principles which underlie its 

 formation and development, and realise the reason why design, educated 

 organised design, should control the garden as much as the house and 

 all that is therein. 



Perhaps here, at the outset, I had better say what I personally 

 conceive these underlying principles to be. 



First of all then I shall say seclusion, for if this was not the great 

 aim of the old gardeners, it is an end which has certainly been attained ; 

 and it is at least interesting to find that the original meaning of the 

 word garden in almost every language was "an enclosed space," and in 

 the Greek word "chortos" a secondary meaning was "a feeding-place." 

 The brick wall, with its green-crusted coping ; the close-clipped hedge, 

 defying the prying eyes of the curious ; high trellis-work, with its 

 entwining creepers, all point to this end, and, while serving the useful 

 purpose of giving shelter to fruit and flower, wrap the whole garden 

 with a tranquil air of seclusion, security, and mystery. This was well 

 understood in the seventeenth century, and is, I think, clearly the reason 

 why Georgian houses were so often placed close to the road, in order to 

 give more space and seclusion in the gardens lying behind them. 



After seclusion comes use. Gardens were made, not merely for 

 pleasure, but to provide the home with necessaries and delicacies elsewhere 

 unattainable. Fruit-growing was a fine art. The bakehouse, brewhouse, 

 game larder, fishpond, dovecot, herb garden, walled fruit garden, orchard, 

 quincunx, and stillroom were necessities, and not merely evolved out of 

 playful fancy. 



For instance there is, I think, no doubt that the fishpond or tank 

 owed its origin in mediaeval Catholic England to the demand for fish, 

 and hence the development and charming treatment of these ponds in 

 later times. The ladies of the household were experts in all that 

 pertained to garden produce, and the recipes of our great-great-grand- 

 mothers would probably considerably astonish their twentieth-century 

 descendants. The old-fashioned herb garden must not be forgotten. 

 The culture and curing of "simples" was formerly part of a lady's 

 education, and gardens were ofttimes renowned for this feature alone. 

 Evelyn says, " We walked into a large garden, esteemed for its furniture 

 one of the fairest, especially for simples and exotics." Then also the 

 necessity for good dry paths and terraces, for it was in the garden that 

 exercise was largely taken. Roads were few and bad, and ladies no 

 doubt disliked mud as much then as they do now. 



The garden was therefore an integral part of the home — indeed an 

 absolute necessity — for modern conditions were unknown, and if the 

 household was not self-supporting it could barely exist ; so garden and 

 house grew up and were designed together, for each was the complement 

 of the other. Thus, I think that the keynote may be said to have been 

 necessity, to which was doubtless added a real love of beauty for its own 



