The Flower Garden. 
177 
the work of the architect and more of the taste of the true artist. The former 
now very properly confines his attention to the erection of the dwelling and its 
immediate adjuncts, where strict uniformity in lines and curves, horizontals and 
perpendiculars—the indispensable essentials of his art—are more in harmony 
than in direct contrast with nature. The landscape gardener, the student of 
Nature and her varying forms, now meets the architect on the verge of the 
threshold of the home, and brings his special knowledge, his taste, and his 
skill, born of a more intimate acquaintance with all that is lovely and exquisite, 
in the form and colour of the many beautiful trees, &c., that grace sylvan 
scenery, to bear on the creation, so to speak, of the garden, and tone and 
soften the harsher lines of the building, and impart a finishing touch to the 
surroundings of the house. Too frequently, alas ! the fashioning of a garden 
is regarded as of a mechanical character. The plans are drawn, and the 
contractor proceeds to lay out the ground with mathematical exactness. 
This is not true landscape gardening. A garden to be really beautiful and 
a reflex of Nature’s choicest sylvan scenery, cannot be laid out with rule 
and level, any more than a landscape can be painted with life-like realism 
on a canvas by the aid of the compass and the ordinary paraphernalia of the 
draughtsman. Like the painter, the landscape gardener must paint his 
living picture little by little until a complete, and harmonious whole has 
been obtained. Then, and then only, will an ideal garden be formed, a 
picture charming in all its parts, and a perennial source of interest at all seasons 
of the year. 
But in a work of this kind, we are bound to study the varying tastes of 
the reader. While we give at least one example of the present-day style of 
gardens, which will indicate by its free and graceful curves, its pleasing 
groups of shrubs and hardy flowers, combined in happy association, its 
variety of charming scenes and its utter freedom from conventionalism, 
how vastly superior in all its parts it is to the more formal style, we also 
include examples of the latter to enable the reader to make his choice 
between the two. 
In proceeding to carrying out the first plan, with a view to ensuring a 
garden at once graceful and natural, the efforts of art should be so perfectly 
directed that they impose no artificiality, and while restraining mere license, 
foster and encourage the generous impulses of nature. Bacon says, “ I do 
hold it in the royal ordering of gardens there ought to be gardens for all the 
months of the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in 
