A garden is the place for flowers, a place where one may foster a passion for loveliness, may learn the magic of colour and the glory of form, and quicken sympathy with Nature in her higher moods. And, because the old-fashioned garden more conduces to these ends than the modern, it has our preference. The spirit of old garden-craft, says: "Do everything that can be done to help Nature, to lift things to perfection, to interpret, to give to your Art method and distinctness." The spirit of the modern garden-craft of the purely landscape school says: "Let be, let well alone, or extemporise at most. Brag of your scorn for Art, yet smuggle her in, as a stalking-horse for your halting method and non-geometrical forms."
And, as we have shown, Art has her revenges as well as Nature; and the very negativeness of this school's Art-treatments is the seal to its doom. Mere neutral teaching can father nothing; it can never breed a system of stable device that is capable of development. But old garden-craft is positive, where the other is negative; it has no niggling scruples, but clear aims, that admit of no impediment except the unwritten laws of good taste. Hence its permanent value as a standard of device—for every gardener must needs desire the support of some backbone of experience to stiffen his personal efforts—he must needs have some basis of form on which to rest his own device, his own realisations of natural beauty—and what safer, stabler system of garden-craft can he wish for than that of the old English garden—itself the outcome of a spacious age, well skilled in the pictorial art and bent upon perfection?
The qualities to aim at in a flower-garden are beauty, animation, variety, mystery. A garden's beauty, like a woman's beauty, is measured by its capacity for taking fine dress. Given a fine garden, and we need not fear to use embellishment or strong colour, or striking device, according to the adage "The richly provided richly require."
PLAN SHEWING ARRANGEMENT OF FOUNTAIN, YEW WALK, AND FLOWER BEDS FOR A LARGE GARDEN.
(PERSPECTIVE VIEW).
Because Art stands, so to speak, sponsor for the grace of a garden, because all gardening is Art or nothing, we need not fear to overdo Art in a garden, nor need we fear to make avowal of the secret of its charm. I have no more scruple in using the scissors upon tree or shrub, where trimness is desirable, than I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once represented a virgin world. There is a quaint charm in the results of the topiary art, in the prim imagery of evergreens, that all ages have felt. And I would even introduce bizarreries on the principle of not leaving all that is wild and odd to Nature outside of the garden-paling; and in the formal part of the garden my yews should take the shape of pyramids or peacocks or cocked hats or ramping lions in Lincoln-green, or any other conceit I had a mind to, which vegetable sculpture can take.