CHAPTER VII.
THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING—(continued.)
"I cannot think Nature is so spent and decayed that she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, like herself; and when she collects her strength is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies; she is not."—Ben Jonson.
The old-fashioned country house has, almost invariably, a garden that curtseys to the house, with its formal lines, its terraces, and beds of geometrical patterns.
But to the ordinary Landscape-gardener the terrace is as much anathema as the "Kist o' Whistles" to the Scotch Puritan! So able and distinguished a gardener as Mr Robinson, while not absolutely forbidding any architectural accessories or geometrical arrangement, is for ever girding at them. The worst thing that can be done with a true garden, he says ("The English Flower Garden," p. ii), "is to introduce any feature which, unlike the materials of our world-designer, never changes. There are positions, it is true, where the intrusion of architecture and embankment into the garden is justifiable; nay, now and then, even necessary."
If one is to promulgate opinions that shall run counter to the wisdom of the whole civilised world, it is, of course, well that they should be pronounced with the air of a Moses freshly come down from the Mount, with the tables of the law in his hands. And there is more of it. "There is no code of taste resting on any solid foundation which proves that garden or park should have any extensive stonework or geometrical arrangement.... Let us, then, use as few oil-cloth or carpet patterns and as little stonework as possible in our gardens. The style is in doubtful taste in climates and positions more suited to it than that of England, but he who would adopt it in the present day is an enemy to every true interest of the garden" (p. vi).
So much for the "deadly formalism" of an old-fashioned garden in our author's eyes! But, as Horace Walpole might say, "it is not peculiar to Mr Robinson to think in that manner." It is the way of the landscape-gardener to monopolise to himself all the right principles of gardening; he is the angel of the garden who protects its true interests; all other moods than his are low, all figures other than his are symbols of errors, all dealings with Nature or with "the materials of our world-designer" other than his are spurious. For the colonies I can imagine no fitter doctrines than our author's, but not for an old land like ours, and for methods that have the approval of men like Bacon, Temple, More, Evelyn, Sir Joshua, Sir Walter, Elia, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Morris, and Jefferies. And, even in the colonies, they might demand to see "the code of taste resting on any solid foundation which proves" that you shall have any garden or park at all!
"If I am to have a system at all," says the author of "The Flower Garden" (Murray, 1852), whose broad-minded views declare him to be an amateur, "give me the good old system of terraces and angled walks, the clipt yew hedges, against whose dark and rich verdure the bright old-fashioned flowers glittered in the sun." Or again: "Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcombical times, that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of gardening is the vainest.... The real beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts after rarity. If we review the various styles that have prevailed in England from the knotted gardens of Elizabeth ... to the landscape fashion of the present day, we shall have little reason to pride ourselves on the advance which national taste has made upon the earliest efforts in this department" ("The Praise of Gardens," p. 270).