And now to come to our point. A dressed garden, I said, is Nature idealised—pastoral scenery put fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is a master of what the French writer calls "the charming art of touching up the truth."
Emerson observes that all the Arts have their origin in some enthusiasm; and the art of gardening has for its root, man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees and landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to speak, passed from the stage of emotion to that of form. A garden is the result of the emulation which the vision of beauty in the world at large is ever provoking in man—
"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landskip round it measures."
What of Nature has affected man on various occasions, what has pleased his eye in different moods, played upon his emotions, pricked his fancy, suggested reverie, stirred vague yearnings, brought a sense of quickened joy—pastoral scenery, the music of leaves and waters, the hues and sweetness of country flowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form of tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh, autumn's glow, summer's bravery, winter's grey blanched face—each thing that has gone home to him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania. Inspired by their beauty and mystery, he has gathered them to himself about his home, has made a microcosm out of the various detached details which sum up the qualities, features, and aspects of the open country; and the art of this little recreated world is measured by the happy union of naturalness and of calculated effect.
What sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of gardeners, I asked a moment ago, which were not shared by English gardeners from time immemorial? The art of gardening, I said, has its root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. See how closely the people of old days must have observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the embroidery of the meadows, the livery of the woods at different seasons, or they would not have been capable of building up that piece of hoarded loveliness, the old-fashioned English garden!
The pleasaunce of old days has been mostly stubbed up by the modern "landscape gardener," but if no traces of them were left we have still here and there the well-schemed surroundings of our English homes—park, avenue, wood, and water—the romantic scenery that hems in Tintern, Fountains, Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the English for planting. If the tree, shrub, and flower be gone from the grounds outside the old Tudor mansion, there still remains the blue-green world in the tapestries upon the walls, with their airy landscapes of trees and hills, hanging-gardens, flower-beds, terraces, and embowered nooks—a little fantastical it may be, but none the less eloquent of appreciation of natural beauty not confined to the gardener, but shared by the artist-maid, who
... "with her neeld composes
Nature's own shape, of bird, branch, or berry,
That even Art sisters the natural roses."
And should these relics be gone, we still have the books in the library, rich in Nature-allusion. The simple ecstasies of the early ballad in the opening stanzas of "Robin Hood and the Monk"—
"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song;
To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tre";