The book of garden design

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
HANDBOOKS OF PRACTICAL GARDENING—XXV EDITED BY HARRY ROBERTS
THE BOOK OF GARDEN DESIGN
LAWN AND SHADE
BY CHARLES THONGER AUTHOR OF “THE BOOK OF GARDEN FURNITURE”
“A garden is a beautiful book, writ by the finger of God; every flower and every leaf is a letter. You have only to learn them—and he is a poor dunce that cannot, if he will, do that—to learn them and to join them, and then to go on reading and reading, and you will find yourself carried away from the earth to the skies by the beautiful story you are going through.”—Douglas Jerrold.
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK. MCMV
Turnbull & Spears, Printers, Edinburgh.
The whole subject of Garden Design is so diverse and complicated that I must be pardoned for disclaiming any ideas of completeness for this small and unpretending book. To refer, however briefly, to the methods of different workers, and the varied effects obtained by them; or to present in detail the many phases of garden making as practised in England to-day, would necessitate not one volume, but several.
If the reader’s object in perusing these pages is to find a model or plan which he may slavishly duplicate in his own garden, he will, I am afraid, search in vain. Garden “design” is not of necessity formal, and suggestive though the name may be of set patterns and geometrical figures, more may be learnt concerning it in the woods and meadows of Nature than in all the musty volumes which line the shelves of the professional’s office. The pleasures of garden making are so real that each one should jealously guard for himself the privilege of being his own designer.
It is with the idea of helping the novice to help himself that I ask his acceptance of whatever may be of value to him in “The Book of Garden Design.”
C. T.