;mi JOURNAL OK Til K KOYAL HORTICULTURAL S0C1KTY. 



TIJM PRACTICE OK (iAltl)KN DKSKJN. 

 Thomas II. Mawson, Hod. A.1U.H.A. 



[Leoture delivered September 29, L908.] 



In meditating upon the present lecture I foil to wondering what lino 

 I should Lo expected to strike. I tun afraid that somo who have to do 

 with the severely practical side of getting a garden into form will expect 

 nie to dual with all the hundred and one devices that go to tho shaping 

 mid fencing of a garden, and will expect me to begin by being submerged 

 under the removal of tons upon tons of earth, blasting rocks, adding to 

 this upheaval by carting stones and gravel and ballast, bricks and mortar, 

 manure, and so forth ad libitum, truck loads of trees and shrubs, of gate 

 fencing, iron gates, espaliers, greenhouses in sections, wiro netting, casks 

 of tar, and then, gradually working my way to daylight and order by " bits 

 of oily paper which Ik* calls his plans," evolve order out of chaos. I dare 

 say it would he very easily possible to make an agreeable, entertaining 

 LeotUN OX) these linos. 



There are many men whom you could embed amid a confusion such 

 as 1 have described, and you would bo absolutely sure that the result would 

 be at least creditable, and with certain men, having the engineer's bent of 

 mind, the bigger the upheaval the better they like it; but neither of these 

 two nu n has exactly the (nullifications needed for designing and disposing 

 a garden ; neither the trustworthy man that can always be roliod upon to 

 do everything creditably, nor the engineer that is never outdone with the 

 immensity of an undertaking. The engineer w orks entirely on the principle 

 ot calculation, and 1 would not for a, moment put a slight upon his needed 

 co partnership, in large works particularly. 1 desire, whenever possible, 

 bo have my work in capable hands, and to launch it upon a correctly 

 estimated basis; hut unleSS a, man has the faculty of seeing in those 1 , 

 mysterious heaps and accumulations, unsuspected possibilities, as an 

 artist does in the heavy daubs of thick paint which he throws about 

 tlir canvas, I do not think he has tho right talent for designing a garden. 

 I am not going to enter into the way those ideas are fostered or cultivated; 

 if you are educated to design gardens you must have the impulse or spring 

 ol fertile ideas, and know how to clothe them with ottbetive expression. 



It may he that you are conscious, after you have struck some particu- 

 larly happy and original vein and got it nicely carried out, that you feel 

 the job is only partly youi own doing, and that a good deal of it, and 

 probably t he best part, has to come by a process which you cannot explain. 

 A satirical critic, Seizing upon the remark made by a landscape gardener, 

 who .a,ited that he was wonderfully helped in the execution of his work by 

 the accidental developments and the Unlooked-for groupings that occurred, 

 turned it to his own account by saying that landscape gardening is an art 

 thai reliefl upon accident for its eil'ect. 



