THE RENAISSANCE OF THE FLOWER-GARDEN.
THE revival of gardening is among the most interesting movements in the outdoor life of modern England. It is more than a revival, for the flower-garden of to-day is more beautiful, and contains more flowers, and finer flowers, than any gardens the world has ever seen. It is more permanent than a taste. It is an art, well understood in thousands of country houses, not only by the servants, but by the owners. The modern flower-gardening has its " schools," in which the formalist and the naturalist compete, on principles well understood, and in their competition advance the common cause in the service of the beautiful. At the present moment the "naturalists" are in the ascendant. It must be admitted that their contribution to the possibilities of the garden has richly earned for them the gratitude of their followers. They have developed and improved hun- dreds of the hardier outdoor plants ; they have shown how and where they should be planted, and by precept and example have brightened, in the literal sense of the word, the homes of England. The names of Mr. Robinson, the author of " The English Flower Garden," and of the pioneers of the " herbaceous border " and of modern amateur gardening, will go down to posterity with those of Parkinson and Sent, while the works of Dean Hole and Miss Jekyll will illustrate to the curious the practical results of the teaching so begun. "Heart garden. ing," not " Head gardening," is the title by which the former describes the horticulture he loves, but the combination of sense and sensibility which controls it is evident and con- vincing. None but the wise as well as the good could scheme and devise such masses of pure colour and perfect form from perishable flowers, or make them succeed each other month by month on the bright margins of our lawns. Others, in single-minded devotion, have developed in the perfection of natural beauty the individual flowers and flowering trees in their proper surroundings, such as the rose, the nymphwas, and the azaleas, and the plants native to rocks and mountainsides. Evidence of the growth of the taste for this gentle art is seen far from the centres where it finds its final expression in flowers and shrubs. It has a large and popular literature, serious, prac- tical, artistic, and sentimental, ranging from the "light side of gardening" in the works of Mrs. Earle, Mrs. Pye Smith, and "Elizabeth and her German Garden," to the heavy manuals of floriculture and those recurring joys of amateurs, the illustrated flower and bulb catalogues of the great seeds- men and purveyors.
A very great proportion of those interested in the country generally are only just waking up to the possibilities of the garden, and the astonishing progress which has been made in the art of late years. Ladies saw this far sooner than men, though men amateurs are every day added to the followers of the art. The possible convert who begins to take notes in the natural garden and herbaceous borders of a modern country hone asks himself whence and when the components of this blaze of pure colour came. If he tries to analyse the parts he finds that perhaps one-half in bulk—not in number of species—are flowers he knows, but used in a way other than that he remembers. The tall background of an old wall will be covered with masses of purple clematis, alternating with the pink of his old friend the everlasting pea, and the cream and flesh colour of climbing roses, and with one or two scarlet climbers he has never seen before. The flowers next in height and rank will be partly old favourites, partly quite new to him, and partly glorifications of old forms. He will see the old favourite white lilies, and the scarlet tiger-lilies. Bat with these are many new and beautiful kinds, ten varieties of iris for one he knew, poppies such as his boyhood never dreamed of, spikes of yellow 5 ft. high, which his puzzled recollection identifies as a glorified mullein of the roadside, Canterbury bells in masses, tall and covered with blossom, not only purple, but of the most exquisite shades of pink and blue and cream. Columbines, instead of being of one variety of sombre hire, are now dreams of pink and amber, or crimson and blue. And, lastly, he will note that every good flower which he remembers is now propagated, not in scanty quantities, but in profusion, and that those of poor quality and colour are discarded and find no place. There is nothing which is not first-class of its kind. Second-rate flowers have simply dis- appeared. Merit is the sole passport to these Elysian fields. Fashion and fads are no longer potent to introduce ugliness or excuse inelegance. The open mind is particularly characteristic of the modern flower - gardener. Like a master craftsman, he takes all good material as he finds it and combines it for his ends. The wild foxglove and the bracken are brought from the woods and set in the borders, while giant white lilies are set to blossom in the dark shadow of English groves.
The best point about this revival of gardening, next to its beauty, is its comparative cheapness. Before the new era a good flower-garden was a costly luxury. It was the privilege only of the rich, and in its best form was enjoyed only by the great ones of this earth. Its mainstay was the brilliant "carpet bedding" set on the edges of terraces, or more com- monly in lawns, and the expense of this was great, because it was necessary for the whole of the plants to be renewed every year, and no one who has not tried it knows how little ground a thousand plants covered. These had all to be raised from cuttings, kept through the winter, and though the effect was good of its kind, and is still largely needed in the half-formal parts of the garden which form the appro- priate setting of many houses, especially the larger " halls " and "places," the whole thing was a failure in a small garden. Humble imitations of the "bedding out" of the great houses were utterly unsatisfactory. As many of the owners had no glass, or did not care to be at the trouble to raise the necessary hundreds or thousands of blue, red, and yellow items, they became so frightfully demoralised as to buy all these ready made. They were poked into the beds, which till then had been bare earth, about the middle of June, and stood till the frost killed them at the end of October. It was a regular custom for carts and vans to go round the country selling geraniums, lobelias, and yellow calceolarias in pots for the rectory and villa gardens. Not one bore a blossom which it was a joy to gather, and in personal satis- faction in their rearing and growth was not to be found.
The fluctuations and history of the taste for flower. gardening in this country are more closely connected with the changes in national character than most of the decorative and creative arts. There is clear evidence that when in the days of Elizabeth and James I. every one was building fine houses, and "all England was a stonecutter's yard," flowers were sought for beauty's sake, flowers which, as Gerarde quaintly says of the sweet-William, "though not good for the belly, were meet to deck the breast of beauty." The building of the more purely Renaissance houses in the days of Charles I. and Charles II. gave us much that was best in the Italian gardens,—terraces and balustrades of perfect pro- portions, good statues, exquisite gates, fine old leadwork. This is a great inheritance, and the work still remains, and if some complain of them as of the architecture of St. Peter's, that it is " too rational far, too earthly," others will never cease to enjoy the intellectual pleasure of seeing these fine forms, the terraces, the tripods, and the sundials, and the winged horses and tritons by the lakes, which we borrowed from Italian brains. But the Italian garden is not a flower-
garden. The only thing which we borrowed from them on and under which flowers grow is the pergola. Tneir gardens meant shade, level walks in a country which was all hills, water, and marblework, adorned with statues. Even the Spanish gardens of the Alcazar, though fall of orange and citron, have few flowers. We now add to this the brilliant carpet bedding in the formal parts, and the modern " wilderness " with the intermediate herbaceous garden. The latter has not in the least killed the admiration for the outdoor architectural arts. At the present moment wrought- iron gates, railings, statues of bronze, vases of lead and marble, are being imported from the ancient chateaux of France, and the villas of Italy into England, to be sold to the owners of gardens, old and new.
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