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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



regretted starting on the rule-of- thumb principle without a preliminary 

 plan and survey, or who have discarded it in a large measure, and have 

 not taken the precaution to note their deviations thereon, to their sorrow. 



Someone may say, " Yes, that is all right in a large garden or an estate ; 

 but in smaller gardens I do not see the need of a plan." I was recently 

 called in to adjudicate upon a number of garden designs for a tradesman's 

 plot of some 60 feet by about 200 feet for the garden city of Letchworth, 

 and I think, my friend, your objection to maintaining a plan policy even 

 on a small plot would have been silenced had you seen the variety of 

 ways and the number of workable features and departments which could 

 be accommodated ; some of them needed to be adjusted to a few inches in 

 order not to trespass upon the space for tennis lawn or cartway. One or 

 two of the competitors showed a genius for fine measurements and an 

 ingenuity in planning such as few architects are called upon to exercise, 

 even in the arrangement of the rooms of a house. 



Artists and people of ideas always bring them to the one who can make 

 the most of them, and that is the man of system. He can arrange them 

 in such a way that one person's output will enhance and increase the 

 value of the other. The man of system can usually buy up the artistic 

 man's ideas at his own, not the artist's, price, and can sell them for 

 himself at the artist's valuation, and accordingly he makes a good profit 

 out of them. I do not intend to be hard upon the artist, because usually 

 if his work is arranged in its proper niche or rightly understood he may 

 realize for himself something of its true value. In all these matters 

 there is the systematized part and the artistic, and you cannot afford to 

 dispense with either. System or order gains the first place. 



In one of the affiliated branches of design, the planning of cities, we 

 are being rather overdone with the systematized propagandists, and there 

 is need* to remind people that system will never make a beautiful city. 

 It will secure, or ought in large measure to secure, a healthy city, which 

 is a weightier consideration than the artistic ; but, as I pointed out to an 

 American friend, a citizen of Baltimore, you may commendably replace 

 slums with wide, spacious streets, with long, straight avenues and imposing 

 buildings, but there is a dreary sense of sameness about them which 

 after half-a-day palls upon you, as may be experienced in a good many 

 American and Continental cities and in most of our well-laid-out seaside 

 resorts. The artistic or the accidental side, which is always on the look- 

 out for unlooked-for groupings and picturesque combinations, is neglected. 

 This, I may say, is the making of the interesting part of London and the 

 most of our old cathedral cities, such as York, Chester, and Durham. 

 Where would you be able to look in a modern planned city for such a 

 picturesque combination of lake, foliage, and buildings as the view from 

 the sheet of water fronting Buckingham Palace looking towards the 

 Home Office and Government buildings, the lovely groupings of trees 

 reflected in the water and a background of buildings with falling and 

 rising roofs and turrets, somewhat softened by the distance, peering above, 

 broken here and there with the tall forms of the elms in the middle 

 distance. 



Tn laying special stress on the need for a coherent plan I have no 

 wish to run the cart on one wheel, but to keep it duly balanced. Only 



