Garden-Craft Old and New

ortions we jus

res life may perfe

l men have."-G

, wherein I take the modern position, namely, that the love of Art in a garden, and the love of wild

earlier and later schools of gardening. There is, I said, no trace in the writings, or in the gardening, of the earlier traditional school, of that mawkish sentiment about Natur

s own mind about Nature, or check him from fathoming all her possibilities. Yet with all his seeming unscrupulousness the old gardener does not c

have not now to haggle with the quidnuncs over the less or more of Art permissible in a garden, but to fight out the question whether civilisation shall have any garden at all. Away with this "white man's poetry!" The wild Indian's "intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a s

ive the emotion which we are told "prefers the oppression of surroundings over-sadly tinged, and solitudes that ha

s Plenty" many sorts of beauty are ours, and nothing shall be scorned. God's creation has a broad gamut, a vast range, to

d has made it!

proportions of a perfect garden. Man, we said, is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as double, and each sympathy shall have free play. My inborn Eden instincts draw me to the bloo

is none the less capable of loving and of holding friendly commerce with the things that grew outside his garden hedge, let me bring upon my page a modern of moder

ted Englishmen, who can be equally susceptible to the inward beauties of man's created brain-world, and the outward beauties

native mountain solitudes. There is no one so fully entitled, or so well able to speak of and for her, as he who knows her language to the faintest whisper, who spent his days at her feet, who pored over her lineaments under every change of expression, who in his writings drew upon the secret honey of the beauty and

its varied time-fulness, sweet or stern, glad or grim, pathetic or sublime, as he who carries in his mind the echoes of the passion of the storm, the moan of the passing wind with its beat upon the bald mountain-crag, the sighing of the dry sedge, the lunge of mighty waters, the tones of waterfalls, the inland sounds of caves and trees, the

g girl whose

ts of mor

re-bell, swinging in the breeze, the meadows and the

ter into the soul of t

sweeter than

only gave him the matter of his poem, but wrote h

n, of which he was fully entitled to speak, and we shall see that the man is no less the

a Liberal Art, in some sort like poetry and painting, and its object is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the control of good sense; that is, those of the best and wisest; but, speaking with more precision, it is to assist

at he should extol her, interpret her, sing of her, lift her as high in man's esteem as fine utterance can affect the human soul. Yet when he has done all, said all that inspired imagination can say

but by the revolutionary influences which coloured them, should find common ground and shake hands in a garden, is strange indeed! Both men loved Nature. Bacon, as Dean Church remarks,[50] had a "keen delight in Nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the charm of open-air life;" but his regard for Nature's beauties was not so

that the wreath that the modern man brings for Art in a garden is not only greener and fresher than the gar

t as a craftsman knows the niceties of his craft. "More than one seat in the lake-country," says Mr Myres ("Wordswort

and the wilderness. You passed almost imperceptibly from the trim parterre to the noble wood, and from the narrow, green vista to that wide sweep of lake and mountain which made up on

, after all, not incompatible. The field, the waste, the moor, the mountain, the trim garden with its parterres and terraces, are one Nature. These things breathe one breath, they sing one music, they share one heart between them; the difference between the dressed and the undressed i

he realities of rude Nature, and that deliberately-contrived, purpose-made, piece of human handicraft, a well-equipped garden. One need not be

sad music

e is an unerring rightness both in rude Nature and in garden grace, in the chartered libert

ay have as to the amount of Art a garden may receive in defiance of Dryasdust "codes of taste." It explains what your artist-gardener friend meant when he said that he had as much sympathy with, and felt as much interest in, the moving drama of Nature going on on this as on that side of his garden-hedge, and how he could pass from the rough theme outside to the ordered music inside, from the uncertain windings in the coppice-glade to the pleached alley of the gar

ure's breat

less life there, in the variety of plant-form, the palpitating lights, t

is all

elicious

ower meadows, learning afresh the glory of weed life in the lush magnificence of the great docks, the red sorrel, the willow-herb, the purple thistles, and the gay battalions of fox-gloves thrown out in skirmishing

omparison between them. He can be eloquent upon the charms of a garden, its stimulus for the tired eye and mind, the harmony that resides in the proportions of its lines and masses, the gladness of its colour, the delight of its frankly decorative arrangement, the sense of rest that comes of its symmetry and repeated patterns. He will tell you that for halcyon days, when life's wheels

not to the garden that you will go for Nature's comfort. The chalices of its flowers store not the dew that shall cool your brow. Nay, at times like these the garden poses as a kind of lovely foe, to mock you with its polite reticence, its look

the sounds that

despair against the unavailing passion of tides that for ten thousand years and more have hurled themselves against this heedless shore. Or you shall find some sequestered corner of the land that keeps its scars of old-world turmoil, the symptoms of the hustle of primeval days, the shock of grim shapes, long ago put to sleep beneath

be dull, an

the us in

as something

holms of

permitted charms of a modern garden; better than these is the stir and enthusiasm of Nature's broad estate, the boulder-tossed moor, where the hare runs races in her mirth, and the lark has a special song for your ear; or the high transport of hours of indolence spent basking in the bed of purple heather, your nostrils filled w

balanced mind that will not churlishly refuse "God's plenty," an eye quick to discern the marvel

Fortune, what

b me of free

hut the wind

rora shows her b

r my constant

awns, by living

nerves and fin

s to the great

, virtue, nought

these Lectures and Addresses sh

l'art en Italie (

hornhill

ane construite avec les débris de ces palais d'or

ave," &c., form part of the epitaph of Richard Barth

:- Lo Hudled u

eene Youth,

h Nature's l

iles all d

Flesh One Hou

One Epitaph

t lived and

nd Lye and s

, whether

ot hence be

nal in the heavens, where all the trees are trees of life, the flowers all amaranths; all the plants perennial, ever verdant, ever pregnant, and where tho

My Ep

whose name was

knowing what

rst sweet conscio

ought electri

s in the caly

eader, pass

row! There is

ngdom of a

y flower is

t's Sketch-book,"

int, not for use.... I heard the cherry-trees were now budding, so I hurried up to take advantage of them, and found them more beautiful than I had ever imagined. There are

unning are our gardeners now in these days that they presume to do, in a manner, what they list with Nature, and moderate her course in things as if they were her superiors. It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americans, Taprobane, Canary Isles, and all parts of the world, the which, albeit that his respect of the constitutions of our bodies, they do not grow for us (because God hath bestowed sufficient commodities upon every cou

ing glory, I go thither every afternoon and cut with my hatchet an Indian path thro' the thicket, all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures." (John Morley's Essays, "Emerson," p. 304.) But, as M

y the Third to Montaigne. "Then, sir

of the quadrangles. He asked for the gardener, and made minute enquiries as to the method of laying down and maintaining the grass. "That's all, is it?" he exclaimed, when the

trived, but that which hath an En

and Hedger

he Praise o

ical Journal,"

luminations." Birch and Jen

rde

i. ff.

xvii.

ii.

03 f

51 f

2 f.

67

425. f.

7. f

x. f.

vi.

iii. f

vi.

. v.

i. f.

vi. f.

vii.

v. ff.

22. f.

425. f.

72

vi. f.

Garden."-W

enturies of that conservatism which has spared the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the future which has made men delight to spend their

the Mr Brown here referred to is "Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the Edinburgh Magazine, 1757-1831." Yet, sur

l's "Ode t

ites of in his 'Sylva') ... In his garden he has four large round philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a fa

arden, the carefully-disposed ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter-poise, the varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven, as it were, into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used much as the jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so unjust to the modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring over-much for flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may fairly say it has no monume

d its wildernes

Century Magazi

the Jameses and Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II.;" and we hear also of André Mollet, garde

a group of fine cedars and an ilex beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclin

; and, above all, the gardens, which are incomparable by reason of the inequality of the

the stiff, formal manner by Eyre, "an imitator of Bridgman," and contained 23 acres. The park

n Picturesque Beauty," though published in part in 1782, belongs really to the second phase of the Landscape School. Shenstone's "Unconnected Thoughts on the

ue" School, its characteristic feature being "the displa

party, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship,

ise of Garden

bid.,

that the English had no garden-style till the 18th

ich as nearly represents a tortured horse-shoe as Nature would permit; and his trees he puts in a happy-go-lucky way, and allows them

They represent gleanings from various sources, combined with personal o

place always depends on Nature, which can only be assisted, but cannot be entirely changed, or greatly controlled by Art; but the character of a place is wholly dependent on Art; thus the house, the buildings, the gardens, the roads, the b

they travel about, watch the effect of such lawns as remain to us, and compare them with what has been done by certain landscape-gardeners, there would shortly be, at many a country-seat, a rapid carting away of the terrace and all its adjuncts." Marry, this is sweeping! But Repton has some equally strong words condemning the very plan our Author recommends: "In

flowers and shrubs, and to attach to the mansion that scene of 'embellished neatness' usually cal

y a noble house may lose by a meanly-p

Practice of Landscape

an twenty little irregularities." "Every variety in the outlin

accompany

well, near Owslebury in Hampshire. Here you realise the wizardry of green gloom and sens

n the north side of the garden should be so placed as to face the sun at about an hour before noon, or a little to east of south; in less favoured localities it should be made to face direct south, and in the

with nothing but roses, and nobody would desire

caws and other birds of gorgeous plumage." But Lord Beaconsfield is Benjamin Disraeli-a master of the ornate, a bit of a dandy always. In Italy, too, they throw in porc

amerton's "Sylva

worth," English Men of

sh Men of Letters S

NTE

LL AND

NBU