Let it be our aim, then, to give to gardening all the method and distinctness of which it is capable, and admit no impediments. A garden not fifty yards square, deftly handled, judiciously laid out, its beds and walks suitably directed, will yield thrice the opportunity for craft, thrice the scope for imaginative endeavour that a two-acre "garden" of the pastoral-farm order, such as is recommended of the faculty, will yield. The very division of the ground into proportionate parts, the varied levels obtained, the framed vistas, the fitting architectural adjuncts, will alone contribute an air of size and scale. As to "codes of taste" (which are usually in matters of Art only someone's opinions stated pompously), these should not be allowed to baulk individual enterprise. "Long experience," says that accomplished gardener and charming writer, E. V. B., in "Days and Hours in a Garden" (p. 125), "Long experience has taught me to have nothing to do with principles in the garden. Little else than a feeling of entire sympathy with the diverse characters of your plants and flowers is needed for 'Art in a Garden.' If sympathy be there, all the rest comes naturally enough." Or to put this thought in Temple's words, "The success is wholly in the gardener."
If a garden grow flowers in abundance, there is success, and one may proceed to frame a garden after approved "codes of taste" and fail in this, or one may prefer unaccepted methods and find success beyond one's fondest dreams. "All is fine that is fit" is a good garden motto; and what an eclectic principle is this! How many kinds of style it allows, justifies, and guards! the simplest way or the most ornate; the fanciful or the sweet austere; the intricate and complex, or the coy and unconstrained. Take it as true as Gospel that there is danger in the use of ornament—danger of excess—take it as equally true that there is an intrinsic and superior value in moderation, and yet the born gardener shall find more paths, old and new, that lead to Beauty in a plot of garden-ground than the modern stylist dreams of.
The art of gardening may now be known of all men. Gardening is no longer a merely princely diversion requiring thirty wide acres for its display. Everyone who can, now lives in the country, where he is bound to have a garden; and I repeat what I said before, let no one suppose that the beauty of a garden depends on its acreage, or on the amount of money spent upon it. Nay, one would almost prefer a small garden plot, so as to ensure that ample justice shall be done to it.[46] In a small garden there is less fear of dissipated effort, more chance of making friends with its inmates, more time to spare to heighten the beauty of its effects.
To some extent the success of a garden depends upon favourable conditions of sun, soil, and water, but more upon the choiceness of its contents, the skill of its planting, the lovingness of its tendence. Love for beauty has a way of enticing beauty; the seeing eye wins its own ranges of vision, finds points of vantage in unlikely ground. "I write in a nook," says the poet Cowper, "that I call my boudoir; it is a summerhouse, not bigger than a sedan-chair; the door of it opens into the garden that is now crowded with pinks, roses, and honeysuckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard. It formerly served an apothecary as a smoking-room; at present, however, it is dedicated to sublimer uses." What a mastery of life is here!
"As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
By our own spirits are we deified."
But I must not finish the stanza in this connection.
A garden is pre-eminently a place to indulge individual taste. "Let us not be that fictitious thing," says Madame Roland, "that can only exist by the help of others—soyons nous!" So, regardless of the doctors, let me say that the best general rule that I can devise for garden-making is: put all the beauty and delightsomeness you can into your garden, get all the beauty and delight you can out of your garden, never minding a little mad want of balance, and think of proprieties afterwards! Of course, this is to "prove naething," but never mind if but the garden enshrine beauty. To say this is by no means to allow that the garden is the fit place for indulging your love of the out-of-the-way; not so, yet a little sign of fresh motive, a touch of individual technique, a token, however shyly displayed, that you think for yourself is welcome in a garden. Thus I know of a gardener who turned a section of his grounds into a sort of huge bear-pit, not a sunk-pit, but a mound that took the refuse soil from the site of his new house hollowed out, and its slopes set all round with Alpine and American garden-plants, each variety finding the aspect it likes best, and the proportion of light and shade that suits its constitution. This is, of course, to "intrude embankments" into a garden with a vengeance, yet even Mr Robinson, if he saw it, would allow that, as in love and war, your daring in gardening is justified by its results, where, as George Herbert has it—
"Who shuts his hand, hath lost its gold;
Who opens it, hath it twice told."
A garden is, first and last, a place for flowers; but, treading in the old master's footsteps, I would devote a certain part of even a small garden to Nature's own wild self, and the loveliness of weed-life. Here Art should only give things a good start and help the propagation of some sorts of plants not indigenous to the locality. Good effects do not ensue all at once, but stand aside and wait, or help judiciously, and the result will be a picture of rude and vigorous life, of pretty colour and glorious form, that is gratifying for its own qualities, and more for its opposition to the peacefulness of the garden's ordered surroundings.