Studio: international art (5.1895)

The Garden and its Art

set on a pedestal in Dutch gardens. It is best to employed, chiefly in potted evergreens, ivy and

be very chary of all ornamental detail in terra cotta simple creepers, that look more or less comely in

or stonework, unless it accord with a sumptuous all the changing seasons of our climate,

building. For an ordinary villa or country house, For Art is mainly good taste—plus common

simple terraces, walls with round stone balls, as sense—whether you deal with pictures or flowers ;

finials to the buttresses, or gate piers, sundials on and whatever is sham or affected, whatever is unduly

the wall, or on pedestals, vases of plain good shapes, costly or unduly ephemeral, is hardly of the realm

may be used sparsely ; but the great effect should of Art. Art may escape a parterre of a palace and

be gained by hedges and trained foliage, by banks be found in a cottage garden ; but given the good

of turf and clipped edgings of box; by well-dis- taste and the long purse, Art in a palace garden

posed groups of trees that naturally take formal should yield more superb effects that a cottage

shape—cypress, poplars, and the like; and, above garden could hope to achieve,

all, by heaps of common flowers that will survive the We cannot attempt to describe here the glory of

rigour of an English winter, and come fresh in colour which made Mr. Elgood's pictures recall

masses of colour at their due season. The effect memories of flowers in sunlight. Surely of all

of a mass of such hardy perennials, or even of such sensuous delights next to the plash of waves in

fleeting blossoms as those of common nasturtiums, sunshine, is the splendour of flowers in bright

or such annuals as the godetia, or the so-called summer noon, or in the richer light before dusk,

summer chrysanthemum, against a clipped hedge That the pictures which have been the text of this

or an old brick wall, is worth a bed of prize bego- rambling paper brought back the rare delights of

nias or named pelargoniums ten times over, unless their subjects is true enough, and a pleasure to be

indeed the owner be rich enough to use the costly adequately acknowledged here. As you looked

flowers as freely as the common. at them, it seemed as if, sitting in the shadow in

In the true decoration of the garden, as of the some perfect day in June or August, you were

abode, one must decide if it is to be a mere setting conscious of the warm perfumed air coming in soft

for something more important—whether people or breezes to emphasize the cool moisture of the

flowers—or sufficient for itself. In the first case, shade ; when feeling kindly unto all upon earth,

simplicity should rule ; in the latter, the architec- you grudged every moment that passed by ; and

tural features may be more prominent and Nature drank in the full poem of life, which sunshine,

"THE YEW ARBOUR, BULWICK" BY G. S. ELGOOD

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