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peaceful surroundings to the graceful lines and academic grandeurs of 

 Mars Hill at Athens. 



However, in all matters you have to strike common ground somewhere, 

 or be content to wander for ever in the wide pathless wilderness. After 

 weighing up all these balancing philosophic considerations in gardening 

 matters we have to return to Nature. Her greatest factors, her nobility — 

 in every land — are trees. A tree is a tree whether it be in Palestine, 

 Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, or England, and a tree resents stiffness. 

 Another has said : " The natural architecture of trees never suggests a 

 plan ; in viewing them the mind regrets the very notion of intentional 

 symmetry while rejoicing in the effects of some natural completeness of 

 design, yet every well-grown tree has symmetry of a kind. Another 

 element in the beauty of great trees is the constant sense of inability to 

 number or become familiar with the enormous detail of their forms. The 

 eager brain which would grasp all their beauties, first in impression and 

 later in detail, so as to carry away the splendid catalogue of their charms, 

 is battled and rebuked by the silent complexity of their myriad parts. 

 They are genii, latent forces dominating their own realm ; they owe 

 nothing to man, not even the sowing of the parent seed, and human pride 

 asks how came they to be there, and to be what they are, an embodiment 

 of that idea of magnificence which we, by stiff regal grandeur and tortuous 

 art, wish to realize, and fail." Trees, which are the garden designer's 

 indispensable stock-in-trade, are what the text is or should be to the 

 preacher ; hereupon hangs both all the law and the prophets ; yet too often, 

 with both preacher and garden designer, the text — the essential — is only 

 a peg to hang a few tawdry rags of his own upon, and likewise the garden 

 designer reverses the order and puts essentials in the second place, with 

 a view to the pronouncing of himself or his client's ostentation and wealth. 

 I hope you will forgive me when I say that this is a sin which I have 

 many times committed, and if it is a sin that has to be paid for in 

 Purgatory, it will take a big sum to get me out — that is, if the penalty 

 is in any way commensurate with the amount of money spent in outlay 

 here. 



The great dividing line of the two styles of garden design is this : we 

 either accept trees, our greatest factor, as they are and bow submissively, 

 or else we set about, as did all the five early forms of civilization, 

 to tease them and make them fit our own heroic devices, as did the 

 Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks, and their 

 followers and imitators, the ancient Romans. The echoes of the last 

 and their traditions may be caught in Italy to-day in the present ruined 

 and restored medieval gardens of the Pope and cardinals. 



I am able to give only one quotation regarding the Medo-Persian view 

 of gardenage, which is instructive from two points of view. First, in 

 presenting to us their national ideal ; and, secondly, as to the light in 

 which we see Cyrus the Great, the welder of the two races, which 

 combined made the Medo-Persian world supremacy. Like many of our 

 most enterprising business men he was able to find time for everything ; 

 and in his relaxation measured, set out, and planted the trees in his park 

 himself. It is the aimless man of unlimited leisure that finds time 

 for nothing. The ((notation is as follows: — "When Lysander brought 



