The garden as a picture

Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Garden of the Villa of Castello.
By Beatrix Jones
Illustrations by Henry McCarter
Garden literature of to-day, as we all know, does not confine itself merely to flowers, insects, and the weather, but is equally authoritative as to astronomy, cookery, philosophy, and even matrimony. Some quotations from old writings, however, come back over and over again, like the burden of a song, and we have grown so accustomed to them that we feel almost defrauded if a garden book does not open with the first sentence of Bacon’s stately essay. These books have done much good in making people realize that gardens are not pieces of ground kept solely for the delight of gardeners of the old school, who seem to have spent their time in designing flower-beds of intricate pattern filled with bedding plants so atrocious in color that a kaleidoscope is Quakerish in comparison. They have also taught the great essential of gardening, that in order to have good gardens we must really care for the plants in them and know them individually as well as collectively. This is an important part of the technique of the garden-maker; he must know intimately the form and texture as well as the color of all the plants he uses; for plants are to the gardener what his palette is to a painter. The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related, except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective to make a composition, as the maker of stained glass does, while the painter has but a flat surface on which to create his illusion; he has, however, the incalculable advantage that no sane person would think of going behind a picture to see if it were equally interesting from that point of view.
The painter has another great advantage over the gardener, because, as he cannot possibly transfer to canvas the millions of colors and shadows which make up the most ordinary landscape, he must eliminate so many that his presentment becomes more or less conventional, just as a playwright must recognize the conventions of the stage, and these limitations are taken for granted by the public, whereas the landscape gardener has to put his equally artificial landscape out in real light, among real trees, to be barred by real and moving shadows. The garden designer has no noncommittal canvas at the back of his picture, but must be prepared, like the sculptor, for criticism from any standpoint, and it would seem as though most people were irresistibly drawn to look at a composition from its least attractive side, as if, in a parallel case, they should criticise only the backs of statues, all of which are not so beautiful as that of the Venus of Syracuse.