* * My French friends were much relieved when I
reached the end of my lecture. One of them suggested that the real reasons why our gardens were preferable to those of other countries were (a) because we had no sense of archi- tecture and (b) because of our climate. I admitted (b) but contested (a). The English, I explained, had possessed a very sensitive eye for architecture up to 1848, a date at which the French eye for architecture had also become permanently dimmed. The Parisians did not care for that remark, and wandered away blithely towards the herbaceous border. An elderly Senator remained behind. He said that there were a few little questions which he wished to ask me. He said that he did not care for flowers since they gave him hay-fever, but that he liked parterres. Anybody, he said, who had any sense of the proper relation between the house and its surroundings must like parterres. The fact that in the last thirty years we had filled our gardens with flowers, many of which smelt very strong indeed, was in his opinion due, not to any change in horticultural taste, but to a decline in our incomes. Parterres required constant attendance whereas " this runs itself on its own." I assured him that he was mistaken. We also had passed through our parterre period and there were still many houses in England where plants and leaves were bedded out. We now preferred natural growths. He was not convinced. " The English," he said cryptically, " will never admit when they are wrong."
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