DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16633#0395
Modern English Gardening
375
broken brick, white sand and painted stone/' he was very near to Bacon with his "As
for the making of knots, or figures, with divers Coloured Earths . . . they be but toys;
you may see as good Sights many Times in Tarts." But the modern writer had even
more justification than the ancient one for his onslaughts.
Miss Gertrude Jekyll, whose eigh y-third birthday in 1926 made her no less than
sixty-four years older than the first edition of her finest book, that on garden colour,
was probably scarcely less influential than Robinson in advocating the charms of
natural gardens. There are two great groups of gardeners; one consisting of people whose
main interest lies in plants as plants, with no particular regard to their place in the garden,
the other of persons who think of plants in terms of gardens. Miss Jekyll is whole-heartedly
a member of the second group. Observe with what cogency she supports her views:
Merely having plants or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a
box of paints from the best colourman; or, to go one step farther, it is like having portions of these paints
set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and it seems to me that the duty we owe to our
gardens and to our own bettering of our gardens is so to use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures;
and that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exalted criticism;
to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of
misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best.
It is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and
gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art. Given the same space of ground and the same
material, they may either be fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of
mind and body—a series of soul-satisfying pictures—a treasure of well-set jewels; or they may be so
misused that everything is jarring and unpleasing.
All this, of course, is not to condemn every type of specialist. The raiser, for example,
must consider the flower first. He must grow it in colonies in his nurseries, partly in
order to provide it with the particular conditions which suit it best, partly for convenience
of comparison and crossing; but the amateur, the garden-maker, is under no such com-
pulsion, and it is to him that Miss Jekyll addresses herself.
Farrer was no less gifted and scarcely less a power than the two great horticultural
writers already discussed. If a somewhat wayward genius, he was still a genius. If his
literary style was sometimes flamboyant, it yet remained arresting and persuasive. And
it must be remembered in his honour that he made an intensive study of Alpine plants
and sought them all over the world, never shrinking from hardship and danger, and pene-
trating fearlessly the most distant recesses of unknown China and savage Tibet. It can
scarcely be doubted that Farrer's books had an immense influence in spreading an interest
in and love for alpine flowers, or that he was the means of inducing thousands of people
to take up rock gardening, just as On the Eaves of the World and other of his travel books
must have inspired many a bold spirit to go out into the wild in search of new plants.
Having paid tribute to the influence of raisers and writers in bringing about a more
artistic system of flower-gardening, we, the people, may perhaps permit ourselves to
believe that neither class could have been completely successful had there not been some-
thing responsive in ourselves—some desire, one might even say some yearning, for guidance
in an art that a higher standard of education, a more widespread love of beauty, taught us
had not been done justice to. It was because the seed which had been sown had fallen on
fertile, receptive ground that germination was so swift and growth so strong. The new
gospel spread with amazing rapidity, so that England became a land of gardens in which
true ideas of Art were conspicuous.
375
broken brick, white sand and painted stone/' he was very near to Bacon with his "As
for the making of knots, or figures, with divers Coloured Earths . . . they be but toys;
you may see as good Sights many Times in Tarts." But the modern writer had even
more justification than the ancient one for his onslaughts.
Miss Gertrude Jekyll, whose eigh y-third birthday in 1926 made her no less than
sixty-four years older than the first edition of her finest book, that on garden colour,
was probably scarcely less influential than Robinson in advocating the charms of
natural gardens. There are two great groups of gardeners; one consisting of people whose
main interest lies in plants as plants, with no particular regard to their place in the garden,
the other of persons who think of plants in terms of gardens. Miss Jekyll is whole-heartedly
a member of the second group. Observe with what cogency she supports her views:
Merely having plants or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a
box of paints from the best colourman; or, to go one step farther, it is like having portions of these paints
set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and it seems to me that the duty we owe to our
gardens and to our own bettering of our gardens is so to use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures;
and that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exalted criticism;
to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of
misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best.
It is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and
gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art. Given the same space of ground and the same
material, they may either be fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of
mind and body—a series of soul-satisfying pictures—a treasure of well-set jewels; or they may be so
misused that everything is jarring and unpleasing.
All this, of course, is not to condemn every type of specialist. The raiser, for example,
must consider the flower first. He must grow it in colonies in his nurseries, partly in
order to provide it with the particular conditions which suit it best, partly for convenience
of comparison and crossing; but the amateur, the garden-maker, is under no such com-
pulsion, and it is to him that Miss Jekyll addresses herself.
Farrer was no less gifted and scarcely less a power than the two great horticultural
writers already discussed. If a somewhat wayward genius, he was still a genius. If his
literary style was sometimes flamboyant, it yet remained arresting and persuasive. And
it must be remembered in his honour that he made an intensive study of Alpine plants
and sought them all over the world, never shrinking from hardship and danger, and pene-
trating fearlessly the most distant recesses of unknown China and savage Tibet. It can
scarcely be doubted that Farrer's books had an immense influence in spreading an interest
in and love for alpine flowers, or that he was the means of inducing thousands of people
to take up rock gardening, just as On the Eaves of the World and other of his travel books
must have inspired many a bold spirit to go out into the wild in search of new plants.
Having paid tribute to the influence of raisers and writers in bringing about a more
artistic system of flower-gardening, we, the people, may perhaps permit ourselves to
believe that neither class could have been completely successful had there not been some-
thing responsive in ourselves—some desire, one might even say some yearning, for guidance
in an art that a higher standard of education, a more widespread love of beauty, taught us
had not been done justice to. It was because the seed which had been sown had fallen on
fertile, receptive ground that germination was so swift and growth so strong. The new
gospel spread with amazing rapidity, so that England became a land of gardens in which
true ideas of Art were conspicuous.