of all that I had let myself in for, I felt anything but arrogant. The
destruction of a lawn is, like the state of matrimony in the Church
Service, an act not to be lightly entered into; and I think I might
have laid away all that stone-work which had come to me, until I should
become more certain of myself--that is how a good many people think
within a week or two of marriage--if I had not, with those doubts
hanging over me, wandered away from the lawn and within sight of the
straggling orchard with its rows of ill-planted plums and apples that
had plainly borne nothing but leaves for many years. They were becoming
an eye-sore to me, and the thought came in a flash:--
“This is the place for a lawn. Why not root up these unprofitable and
uninteresting things and lay down the space in grass?”
Why not, indeed? The more I thought over the matter the more reconciled
I became to the transformation of the house lawn. I felt as I fancy the
father of a well-beloved daughter must feel when she tells him that
she has promised to marry the son of the house at the other side of
his paddock. He is reconciled to the idea of parting with her by the
reflection that she will still be living beyond the fence, and that
he will enjoy communion with her under altered conditions. That is the
difference between parting _with_ a person and parting _from_ a person.
And now, when I looked at the house lawn, I saw that it had no business
to be there. It was an element of incongruity. It made the house look as
if it were built in the middle of a field. A field is all very well in
its place, and a house is all very well in its place, but the place of
the house is not in the middle of a field. It looks its worst there and
the field looks its worst when the house is overlooking it.
I think that it is this impression of incongruity that has made what is
called The Formal Garden a necessity of these days. We want a treatment
that will take away from the abruptness of the mass of bricks and mortar
rising straight up from the simplest of Nature's elements. We want a
hyphenated House-and-Garden which we can look on as one and indivisible,
like the First French Republic.
In short, I think that the making of the Formal Garden is the marriage
ceremony that unites the house to its site, “and the twain shall be one
flesh.”
That is really the relative position of the two. I hold that there are
scores of forms of garden that may be espoused to a house; and I am not
sure that such a term as Formal is not misleading to a large number of
people who think that Nature should begin the moment that one steps out
of one's house, and that nothing in Nature is formal. I am not going to
take on me any definition of the constituent elements of what is termed
the Formal Garden, but I will take it on me to stand up against such
people as would have us believe that the moment you enter a house
you leave Nature outside. A house is as much a product of Nature as
a woodland or a rabbit warren or a lawn. The original house of that
product of Nature known as man was that product of Nature known as a
cave. For thousands of years before he got into his cave he had made his
abode in the woodland. It was when he found he could do better than hang
on to his bough and, with his toes, take the eggs out of whatever nests
he could get at, that he made the cave his dwelling; and thousands of
years later he found that it was more convenient to build up the clay
into the shape of a cave than to scoop out the hillside when he wanted
an addition to the dwelling provided for him in the hollows made by that
natural incident known as a landslide. But the dwelling-house of to-day
is nothing more than a cave built up instead of scooped out.
Whether made of brick, stone, or clay--all products of Nature--it
is fundamentally the same as the primeval cave dwelling; just as a
Corinthian column is fundamentally identical with the palm-tree which
primeval man brought into his service when he wished to construct a
dwelling dependent of the forest of his pendulous ancestors. The rabbit
is at present in the stage of development of the men who scooped out
their dwellings; the beaver is in the stage of development of the men
who gave up scooping and took to building; and will any one suggest that
a rabbit warren or a beaver village is not Nature?
Sir R. Blomfield, in his book to which I have alluded, will not have
this at all. “The building,” he says, “cannot resemble anything in
Nature, unless you are content with a mud hut and cover it with grass.”
That may be true enough; but great architect that he is, he would
have shown himself more faithful to his profession if he had been more
careful about his foundations. If he goes a little deeper into the
matter he will find that man has not yet been civilised or “architected”
out of the impressions left upon him by his thousands of years of
cave-dwelling, any more than he has been out of his arboreal experiences
of as many thousand years. While, as a boy, he retains vividly those
impressions of his ancestors which gradually wear off--though never so
completely as to leave no trace behind them--he cannot be restrained
from climbing trees and enjoying the motion of a swing; and his chief
employment when left to his own devices is scooping out a cave in a
sand-bank. For the first ten or fifteen years of his life a man is in
his instincts many thousand years nearer to his prehistoric relations
than he is when he is twenty; after that the inherited impressions
become blurred, but never wholly wiped out. He is still stirred to the
deepest depths of his nature by the long tresses of a woman, just as was
his early parent, who knew that he had to depend on such long tresses to
drag the female on whom he had set his heart to his cave.
Scores of examples could be given of the retention of these inherited
instincts; but many of them are in more than one sense of the phrase,
“far-fetched.” When, however, we know that the architectural design
which finds almost universal favour is that of the column or the
pilaster--which is little more than the palm-tree of the Oriental forest
of many thousand years ago--I chink we are justified in assuming that
we have not yet quite lost sight of the fact that our dwellings are most
acceptable when they retain such elements as are congenial with their
ancient homes, which homes were undoubtedly incidents in the natural
landscape.
That is why I think that the right way to claim its appropriateness for
what is called the Formal Garden is, not that a house has no place in
Nature, and therefore its immediate surrounding should be more or less
artificial, but that the house is an incident in Nature modified by
what is termed Art, and therefore the surround should be of the same
character.
At the same time, I beg leave to say in this place that I am not so
besotted upon my own opinion as to be incapable of acknowledging
that Sir R. Blomfield's belief that a house can never be regarded as
otherwise than wholly artificial, may commend itself to a much larger
clientèle than I can hope for.
In any case the appropriateness of the Formal Garden has been proved
(literally) down to the ground. As a matter of fact, no one ever thought
of questioning it in England until some remarkable innovators, who
called themselves Landscape Gardeners, thought they saw their way
to work on a new system, and in doing so contrived to destroy many
interesting features of the landscape.
But really, landscape gardening has never been consistently defined. Its
exponents have always been slovenly and inconsistent in stating their
aims; so that while they claim to be all for giving what they call
Nature the supreme place in their designs, it must appear to most people
that the achievement of these designs entails treating Nature most
unnaturally. The landscape gardeners of the early years of the cult
seem to me to be in the position of the boy of whom the parents said,
“Charlie is so very fond of animals that we are going to make a butcher
of him.” To read their enunciation of the principles by which they
professed to be inspired is to make one feel that they thought the
butchery of a landscape the only way to beautify it.
But, I repeat, the examples of their work with which we are acquainted
show but a small amount of consistency with their professions of faith.
When we read the satires that were written upon their work in the
eighteenth century, we really feel that the lampooners have got hold
of the wrong brief, and that they are ridiculing the upholders of the
Formal Garden.
So far as I was concerned in dealing with my insignificant garden home,
I did not concern myself with principles or theories or schools or
consistency or inconsistency; I went ahead as I pleased, and though
Friswell shook his head--I have not finished with him yet on account
of that mute expression of disagreement with my aims--I enjoyed myself
thoroughly, if now and again with qualms of uneasiness, in laying out
what I feel I must call the House Garden rather than the Formal Garden,
where the lawn had spread itself abroad, causing the wing of the house
to have something of the appearance of a lighthouse springing straight
up from a green sea. As it is now, that green expanse suggests a
tropical sea with many brilliant islands breaking up its placid surface.
That satisfies me. If the lighthouse remains, I have given it a _raison
d'etre_ by strewing the sea with islands.
I made my appeal to Olive, the practical one.
“Yes,” she said, after one of her thoughtful intervals. “Yes, I think it
does look naturaler.”
And I do believe it does.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
I differ from many people who knew more about garden-making than I know
or than I ever shall know, in believing that it is unnecessary for the
House Garden--I will adopt this name for it--to be paved between the
beds. I have seen this paving done in many cases, and to my mind it adds
without any need whatsoever a certain artificiality to the appearance
of this feature of the garden. By all means let the paths be paved with
stone or brick; I have had all mine treated in this way, and thereby
made them more natural in appearance, suggesting, as they do, the dry
watercourse of a stream: every time I walk on thorn I remember the
summer aspect of that beautiful watercourse at Funchal in the island of
Madeira, which becomes a thoroughfare for several months of the year;
but I am sure that the stone edgings of the beds and of the fountain
basin look much better surrounded by grass. All that one requires to do
in order to bring the House Garden in touch with the house is to bring
something of the material of the house on to the lawn, and to force
the house to reciprocate with a mantle of ampélopsis patterned with
clematis.
All that I did was to remove the turf within the boundary of my stone
edging and add the necessary soil. A week was sufficient for all,
including the fountain basin and the making of the requisite attachment
to the main water pipe which supplies the garden from end to end.
And here let me advise any possible makers of garden fountains on no
account to neglect the introduction of a second outlet and tap for
the purpose of emptying the pipe during a frost. The cost will be very
little extra, and the operation will prevent so hideous a catastrophe as
the bursting of a pipe passing through or below the concrete basin. My
plumber knew his business, and I have felt grateful to him for making
such a provision against disaster, when I have found six inches of ice
in the basin after a week's frost.
At first I was somewhat timid over the planting of the stone-edged beds.
I had heard of carpet bedding, and I had heard it condemned without
restraint. I had also seen several examples of it in public gardens at
seaside places and elsewhere, which impressed me only by the ingenuity
of their garishness. Some one, too, had put the veto upon any possible
tendency on my part to such a weakness by uttering the most condemnatory
words in the vocabulary of art--Early Victorian! To be on the safe
side I planted the beds with herbaceous flowers, only reserving two for
fuchsias, of which I have always been extremely fond.
I soon came to find out that a herbaceous scheme in that place was a
mistake. For two months we had to look at flowers growing, for a month
we had to look at things rampant, and for a month we had to watch things
withering. At no time was there an equal show of colour in all the beds.
The blaze of beauty I had hoped for never appeared: here and there
we had a flash of it, but it soon flickered out, much to our
disappointment. If the period of the ramp had synchronised for all the
beds it would not have been so bad; but when one subject was rampant the
others were couchant, and no one was pleased.
The next year we tried some more dwarf varieties and such annuals as
verbenas, zinnias, scabious, godetias, and clarkias, but although every
one came on all right, yet they did not come on simultaneously, and I
felt defrauded of my chromatic effects. A considerable number of people
thought the beds quite a success; but we could not see with their eyes,
and our feeling was one of disappointment.
Happily, at this time I bought for a few shillings a few boxes of the
ordinary _echeveria secunda glauca_, and, curiously enough, the same day
I came upon a public place where several beds of the same type as mine,
set in an enclosed space of emerald grass, were planted with
echeveria and other succulents, in patterns, with a large variety of
brilliantly-coloured foliage and a few dwarf calceolarias and irisines.
In a moment I thought I saw that this was exactly what I needed--whether
it was carpet bedding or early Victorian or inartistic, this was what I
wanted, and I knew that I should not be happy until I got it. Every bed
looked like a stanza of Keats, or a box of enamels from the Faubourg de
Magnine in Limoges, where Nicholas Laudin worked.
That was three years ago, and although I planted out over three thousand
echeverias last summer, 1 had not to buy another box of the same
variety; I had only to find some other succulents and transplant some
violas in order to achieve all that I hoped for from these beds. For
three years they have been altogether satisfying with their orderly
habits and reposeful colouring. The glauca is the shade that the human
eye can rest upon day after day without weariness, and the pink and blue
and yellow and purple violas which I asked for a complement of colours,
do all that I hoped they would do.
Of course we have friends who walk round the garden, look at those beds
with dull eyes of disapproval, and walk on after imparting information
on some contentious point, such as the necessity to remove the shoots
from the briers of standard roses, or the assurance that the slugs
are fond of the leaves of hollyhock. We have an occasional visitor who
says,--
“Isn't carpet-bedding rather old-fashioned?”
So I have seen a lady in the spacious days of the late seventies shake
her head and smile pityingly in a room furnished with twelve ribbon-back
chairs made by the great Director.
“Old-fashioned--gone out years ago!” were the terms of her criticism.
But so far as I am concerned I would have no more objection to one of
the ribbon-borders of long ago, if it was in a suitable place, than I
would have to a round dozen of ribbon-back chairs in a panelled room
with a mantelpiece by Boesi and a glass chandelier by one of the Adam
Brothers. It is only the uninformed who are ready to condemn something
because they think that it is old-fashioned, just as it is only the
ignorant who extol something because it happens to be antique. I was
once lucky enough to be able to buy an exquisitely chased snuff-box
because the truthful catalogue had described it as made of pinchbeck.
For the good folk in the saleroom the word pinchbeck was enough. It
was associated in their minds with something that was a type of the
meretricious. But the pinchbeck amalgam was a beautiful one, and the
workmanship of some of the articles made of it was usually of the
highest class. Now that people are better educated they value--or at
least some of them value--a pinchbeck buckle or snuff-box for 'its
artistic beauty.
We see our garden more frequently than do any of our visitors, and we
are satisfied with its details--within bounds, of course. It has never
been our ambition to emulate the authorities who control the floral
designs blazing in the borders along the seafront of one of our
watering-places, which are admired to distraction by trippers under the
influence of a rag-time band and other stimulants. We do not long so
greatly to see a floral Union Jack in all its glory at our feet, or
any loyal sentiment lettered in dwarf beet and blue lobelia against a
background of crimson irisine. We know very well that such marvels are
beyond our accomplishment. What we hoped for was to have under our
eyes for three months of the year a number of beds full of wallflowers,
tulips, and hyacinths, and for four months equally well covered with
varied violas, memsembrianthium, mauve ageratum, the præcox dwarf roses,
variegated cactus used sparingly, and as many varieties of eche-veria
used lavishly, with here and there a small dracaena or perhaps a tuft
of feathery grass or the accentuations of a few crimson begonias to show
that we are not afraid of anything.
We hold that the main essential of the beds of the House Garden is
“finish.” They must look well from the day they are planted in the third
week of May until they are removed in the last week of October. We do
not want that barren interval of a month or six weeks when the tulips
have been lifted and their successors are growing. We do not want a
single day of empty beds or colourless beds; we do not want to see a
square inch of the soil. We want colour and contour under our eyes from
the first day of March until the end of October, and we get it. We have
no trouble with dead leaves or drooping blooms--no trouble with snails
or slugs or leather-jackets. Every bed is presentable for the summer
when the flowers that bloom in the spring have been removed; the effect
is only agreeably diversified when the begonias show themselves in July.
Is the sort of thing that I have described to be called carpet-bedding?
I know not and I trow not; all that I know is that it is the sort of
thing that suits us.
Geometry is its foundation and geometry represents all that is
satisfying, because it is Nature's closest ally when Nature wishes to
produce Beauty. Almost every flower is a geometrical study. Let rose
bushes ramp as they may, the sum of all their ramping is that triumph of
geometry, the rose. Let the clematis climb as unruly as it may, the
end of its labours is a geometrical star; let the dandelion be as
disagreeable as it pleases--I don't intend to do so really, only for the
sake of argument--but its rows of teeth are beautifully geometrical, and
the fairy finish of its life, which means, alas! the magical beginning
of a thousand new lives, is a geometrical marvel.
But I do not want to accuse myself of excusing myself over much for my
endeavour to restore a fashion which I was told had “gone out.” I only
say that if what I have done in my stone-edged geometrical beds is to
be slighted because some fool has called it carpet-bedding, I shall at
least have the satisfaction of knowing that I have worked on the
lines of Nature. Nature is the leader of the art of carpet-bedding on
geometrical lines. Nature's most beautiful spring mattress is a carpet
bed of primroses, wild hyacinths, daffodils, and daisies--every one
of them a geometrical marvel. As a matter of fact the design of every
formal bed in our garden is a copy of a snow crystal.
Of course, so far as conforming to the dictates of fashion in a garden
is concerned, I admit that I am a nonconformist. I do not think that any
one who has any real affection for the development of a garden will be
ready to conform to any fashion of the hour in gardening. I believe that
there never was a time when the artistic as well as the scientific side
of garden design was so fully understood or so faithfully adhered to
as it is just now. There is nothing to fear from the majority of the
exponents of the art; it is with the unconsidering amateurs that the
danger lies. The dangerous amateur is the one who assumes that there
is fashion in gardening as there is a fashion in garments, and that one
must at all hazards live up to the _dernier cri_ or get left behind in
the search for the right thing. F or instance, within the last six or
seven years it has become “the right thing” to have a sunk garden. Now a
sunk garden is, literally, as old as the hills; the channel worn in the
depth of a valley by an intermittent stream becomes a sunk garden in
the summer. The Dutch, not having the advantage of hills and vales, were
compelled to imitate Nature by sinking their flower-patches below the
level of the ground. They were quite successful in their attempt to
put the garden under their eyes; by such means they were able fully to
admire the patterns in which their bulbs were arranged. Put where is the
sense in adopting in England the handicap of Holland? It is obvious that
if one can look down upon a garden from a terrace one does not need
to sink the ground to a lower level. And yet I have known of several
instances of people insisting on having a sunk garden just under a
terrace. They had heard that sunk gardens were the fashion and they
would not be happy if there was a possibility of any one thinking that
they were out of the fashion.
Then the charm of the rock garden was being largely advertised and
talked about, so mounds of broken bricks and stones and “slag” and
rubbish arose alongside the trim villas, and the occupants slept in
peace knowing that those heights of rubbish represented the height--the
heights of fashion. Then came the “crevice” fashion. A conscientious
writer discoursed of the beauty of the little things that grow between
the bricks of old walls, and forthwith yards of walls, guaranteed to be
of old bricks, sprang up in every direction, with hand-made crevices in
which little gems that had never been seen on walls before, were stuck,
and simple nurserymen were told that they were long behind the time
because they were unable to meet the demand for house leeks. I have seen
a ten-feet length of wall raised almost in the middle of a villa garden
for no other purpose than to provide a foot-hold for lichens. The last
time I saw it it was providing a space for the exhibition of a printed
announcement that an auction would take place in the house.
But by far the most important of the schemes which of late have been
indulged in for adding interest to the English garden, is the “Japanese
style.” The “Chinese Taste,” we all know, played a very important part
in many gardens in the eighteenth century, as it did in other directions
in the social life of England. The flexible imagination of Thomas
Chippendale found it as easy to introduce the leading Chinese notes
in his designs as the leading French notes; and his genius was so well
controlled that his pieces “in the Chinese Taste” did not look at all
incongruous in an English mansion. The Chinese wallpaper was a beautiful
thing in its way, nor did it look out of place in a drawing-room with
the beautifully florid mirrors of Chippendale design on the walls, and
the noble lacquer caskets and cabinets that stood below them. Under the
same impulse Sir Thomas Chambers was entrusted with the erection of the
great pagoda in Kew Gardens, and Chinese junks were moored alongside
the banks to enable visitors to drink tea “in the Chinese Taste.” The
Staffordshire potters reproduced on their ware some excellent patterns
that had originated with the Celestials, and in an attempt to be
abreast of the time, Goldsmith made his _Citizen of the World_ a Chinese
gentleman.
For obvious reasons, however, there was no Japanese craze at that
time. Little was known of the supreme art of Japan, and nothing of the
Japanese Garden. Now we seem to be making up for this deprivation of the
past, and the Japanese style of gardening is being represented in many
English grounds. I think that nothing could be more interesting, or, in
its own way, more exquisite: but is it not incongruous in its new-found
home?
It is nothing of the sort, provided that it is not brought into close
proximity to the English garden. In itself it is charming, graceful, and
grateful in every way; but unless its features are kept apart from those
of the English garden, it becomes incongruous and unsatisfactory. It is,
however, only necessary to put it in its place, which should be as far
away as possible from the English house and House Garden, and it will
be found fully to justify its importation. It possesses all the elements
that go to the formation of a real garden, the strongest of these being,
in my opinion, a clear and consistent design; unless a garden has both
form and design it is worth no consideration, except from the very
humblest standpoint.