The English Flower Garden

Abstract

A LOVE of flowers seems more or less characteristic of most human beings, and the tending and caring them is to most people a pleasant labour. Their brightness of colour, their charm of form, the sweetness and refreshingness of their varied perfumes please and delight the senses, while the mystery of their lives and deaths captivates the mind and awakes up the pleasures of hope. In no European country has this love of flowers been more manifested than in England, so that a flower garden seems an indispensable adjunct of an English home. It too often happens that many of those who love flowers have not the knowledge requisite to take care of them, and then the flower garden is handed over to the care of others. What to grow and what not to grow becomes then not so much a question of deliberate enlightened forethought as a thing of fashion, commonplace and unstable. No honest lover of Nature, no one who has once known the beauties of plant life, could ever for a moment remain pleased or satisfied with the arrangement of things out of place which is so peculiarly characteristic of one style of modern English gardening. It was not always thus: anywhere in Continental Europe that one visits “Le Jardin anglais” of some fine demesne or of some public park, there one is sure to find some attempt to form a natural prospect by the judicious arrangement of tree, shrub, flower, and grass; but in England itself, the very home of Sylvia, all traces of Nature are too often obliterated, and a meretricious display of colour, inclosed within a sharply defined geometrical sameness of outline, takes the place of a refreshing contrast in contour accompanied with joyful surprises of brightness. What a difference there is in the pleasure of viewing a large mass Gentiana acaulis in the centre of a wide expanse of scarlet geraniums encircled with yellow calceolarias and viewing some few tufts of the same plant opening their blue corollas amid the grass by the borders of some Alpine meadow. Those who love gardens and like to see in them some few touches of Nature owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. W. Robinson for his life-long labours in disturbing our minds as to the correctness of modern views on gardening, and for in a great measure destroying the miserable conventionality that had made our gardens bad imitations of very inartistic carpets, or of nightmare-giving wall-papers. But in destroying what was bad it was also most desirable to build up something good to replace what was gone, and in the present most welcome volume we find indications, clear and distinct, of the abounding wealth of flowers at our disposal which are fitted for the embellishment of our open-air gardens. In the compilation of this work on the “English Flower Garden,” Mr. Robinson has had the co-operation of some of the most practical and thoughtful writers of the day, and also the valuable aid of Mr. W. Goldring, whose experience as superintendent for some time of the Hardy Plant Department of the Royal Gardens at Kew has well qualified him for the task. The first part of the work—On Gardens, their Arrangement, &c.—is for the greater part from the pen of the author. We should have liked that a small portion of this part had been devoted to the subject of town and suburban gardens of small size. Many a modest cottage garden has, we read, its lessons to give, but then our ideas of a modest cottage garden are not helped by an illustration of the charming grounds attached to Sheen Lodge. The second part contains in alphabetical order a list of the more important genera and species of plants which will grow in the open air in Great Britain or Ireland, with figures, some very good, some indifferent, of most of the more attractive species. In some few cases we notice figures given which are not referred to in the text; when these are not of “desirable” species for the flower garden, as in the case of Gentiana lutea and Scilla maritima, it would have been better to have put others in their place. To all our readers who have or contemplate having a garden we cordially recommend this very excellent book.

The English Flower Garden: Style, Position, and Arrangement. Followed by a Description, Alphabetically Arranged, of all the Plants best suited for its Embellishment; their Culture, and Positions suited for each.

By W. Robinson, with the co-operation of many of the best Flower Gardeners of the day. Illustrated with many Engravings. (London: John Murray, 1883.)