GARDEN DESIGN— COMPARATIVE, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL. 361 



GARDEN DESIGN— COMPARATIVE, HISTORICAL, 

 AND ETHICAL.— I. 



By Thomas H. Mawson, Hon. A.R.I.B.A. 



[Lecture delivered September 1, 1908.] 



This first lecture of the series is to be regarded as a preface to the two 

 which follow. It takes us back to the beginning of gardening, and 

 defines certain broad ethical principles to be gathered from great examples 

 of ancient art, to be accepted or rejected by my readers ; using the broad 

 attested manifestations to illustrate my theory, or, at times, inserting 

 them as a darker background for the purpose of securing strong contrasts, 

 and refusing, for the present at any rate, to be drawn into the vortex of 

 debatable details. 



I have, I believe wisely, abandoned my primary intention of laying in 

 a separate lecture a foundation for my subject by a swift narration of the 

 history of garden design, and then building upon this basis a second 

 lecture, entitled " The Ethics of Garden Design." As I gathered my 

 materials together, the historical proffered, at least in my apprentice 

 hands, to be a dry compilation of facts, a show of mummies, calculated to 

 weary the most patient. In dealing with ancient records one is con- 

 fronted with Voltaire's apothegm : " 1 can always write the best history 

 when I am not hampered with facts." There is often some disagreement 

 between reliable authorities, and the student has to discriminate between 

 the actual facts and the imagination of the historian. 



It is incompatible with the instincts of everyone who has to tend or 

 design a garden to be content with mere surface appearances ; he must 

 get at the roots of things. I have therefore abandoned the former cut- 

 and-dried method and desire to blend the ethical and the historical, making 

 the one branch keep pace with the other, giving the ethical the precedence, 

 and allowing the historical to be illustrative. 



It is a principle of mine, in studying anything and everything in the 

 shape of visual effects, whether of a constructive character or artistic, that 

 you must, along with your study, take into your reckoning the age, the 

 racial instincts, the religion, the pervading customs and environment 

 generally of the designers or producers of the work you are considering, 

 and the prevalent line of thought, political, social, and religious, that 

 obtained at the respective periods ; because in matters artistic nothing 

 is absolute, everything is relative. This is an axiom which, although 

 often before expressed in many different ways, I would at the outset 

 reiterate and fix upon the minds of every student, but especially those who 

 pursue Art, because it has its bearing upon everything visual, construc- 

 tively applied with beauty as the end in view. For example, most objects 

 of man's handiwork are not beautiful, and are not meant to be considered 

 in the abstract ; they are only so relatively, according to their use and 

 association ; a bicycle or a motor-car has no beauty, and yet obtains our 



