IN ARCADIA. 
131 
finds an apt pupil— or shall we rather say an active sympathiser ?— in Mr. Austin : 
who has carried into practice many of the views put forward by the garden re- 
former. For the author is thoroughly practical, and the accounts of his cleanings 
and adaptations show that he knows what he wants and how to carry it out. 
His description loses nothing by being encased in a romantic frame-work, which 
allows the introduction of a “poet,” whose verses form a pleasant feature of the 
book. Mr. Austin “would sacrifice flowers to birds, if he were compelled to 
choose between the two ; ” here are his lines on the thrush, “ of all song birds out 
and away the prince.” 
“ Hearing thee flute, who pines or grieves 
For vernal smiles or showers? 
Thy voice is greener than the leaves, 
And fresher than the flowers. 
“ Scorning to wait for tuneful May, 
When every throat can sing. 
Thou floutest Winter with thy lay, 
And art thyself the Spring.” 
The flowers in the garden are no rare and costly exotics ; they are such as all 
can grow, though even now comparatively few do so. Mr. Austin sees in our 
wild flowers — the “ undulating stretches of woodland anemones,” the “ covering 
and carpeting of wild wood celandine,” “the opulent splendour of the marsh 
marigold” — effects beside which cultivated flowers “have a poverty-stricken 
look.” 
We regret that we can only find room for one extract from this pleasant book : 
— “ Spring has to make way for .Summer, Summer for Autumn, and Autumn for 
Winter ; and only one of these knows how to garden, and it has to do so under rather 
hostile conditions. Summer is absolutely ignorant of the craft, bringing every- 
thing on with a rush, and then having to content itself with woods and copses of 
uniform green ; and, though Winter is a great gardener in one sense, since he makes 
untiring, if generally unnoticed, preparations for future floral display, he has few 
flowers to show of his own. Autumn, I grant, knows the art of gardening to per- 
fection, possessing the secret of careless grace even beyond the Spring. There is 
an orderly negligence, a well-thought-out untidiness, about autumnal forms and 
colours no other season can match. Even to the garden proper, the cultivated 
plots of man. Autumn adds such wonderful touches of happy accident, that when 
it comes, really comes, a wise man leaves his garden alone and allows it to fade 
and wane, and slowly, pathetically pass away, without any effort to hinder or 
conceal the decay. Indeed, it would be worth while having a cultivated garden, 
if only to see what Autumn does with it. What she does she seems to do uninten- 
tionally, and in those almost permanent fits of absence, during which, I suppose, 
she is thinking of the past. But this meditative touch of hers is more discernible 
in the cultivated garden than in the woodlands, and she makes the wild wood too 
moist and chill with her tears for it to be the fitting accessory of a cheerful home. 
Spring may be a less mature artist, but Spring’s hopeful and sunny open-hearted - 
ness more than atones for some little lack of dexterity.” 
The only flaw in the book is the laxity displayed in the spelling of some of the 
plant names — Ainothera, for instance, and Kerryia: and “.Shepherd’s Bane,” for 
“Leopard’s Bane” (p. 51), is odd. But these will no doubt be put right in the 
next edition. 
