178 
Rustic Adornments . 
season/’ and what he would have thought of ribbon and carpet gardening may 
be judged when we read further on : “ As for the making of knots or figures 
with divers coloured earths that they may lie under the windows of the house, 
they be but toys, you may see as good sights many times in tarts.” If there 
be one lesson we learn when we study in Nature’s school, it is that she holds 
not with that uniformity most gardeners crave, and which, to the average pro¬ 
fessor, is the be-all and end-all of his craft. He works by rule, and fain 
would have his plants to grow by measure, and with a due sense of restraint 
and discipline. Not a twig may break the level line, or a floweret stray beyond 
its allotted place, but the knife is invoked, and every tree and shrub bears 
upon its limbs the tokens of a barbarous code. Much of this might be 
remedied if people who possess gardens, and are gifted with ordinary know¬ 
ledge and good taste, would take a sufficiently active interest in them. When 
everything is surrendered to the gardener, no wonder the result is disappoint¬ 
ing. We are not referring to those who command the whole time of one or 
more highly-trained gardeners, but of many of the suburban occupiers, who 
devote some of their leisure to their gardens, and supplement this by the more 
or less regular employment of a jobbing man. They at least might reserve 
to themselves liberty. The garden is a part of the home, and some portion 
of the attention we bestow indoors is due to our outside surroundings—whence 
comes the air we breathe, and upon which our eyes must rest whenever they 
are turned to the light of day. 
“ There is an art even in the shutting and opening of windows,” says Leigh 
Hunt, and we frequently witness a room ordered with careful regard to pro¬ 
priety and refinement, spoiled with the ugliness which obtrudes upon the 
windows. The canvas landscapes we covet for our walls are valued, as the 
art they display is true to Nature in her most beautiful phases—idealised they 
may be—but Nature still—yet we entrust our window-pictures, where leaf and 
flower might be made to reflect and idealise every season of the changeful 
year, to men whom Nature, in her most captivating moods, fails to thrill, and 
whose souls never knew the inspiration of art. In these days there are many 
evidences of improved feeling in matters of form and colour, and glare and 
glitter have ceased to be accounted lovely. It is impossible then that a fairly 
cultured taste can be satisfied with a central blaze of red and yellow issuing 
from a blue crater, and believe that the addition of a grass plot makes the 
enclosure a garden. The truth of Keats’ oft-quoted aphorism receives, 
perhaps, its most perfect illustration in the delight derived from a well-ordered 
