Charles Dickens is said to have once added the following warning to a letter of instruction to a contributor: "Mind! no cant about Art."

It is to be feared that there has been a great deal of cant about "Garden Art" these latter years. Artistic gardening consists in putting the right plant in the right place, and growing it properly when you have got it there! If people talked less about abstract art in gardening, and delved deeper, there would be more beautiful gardens than there are at present.

The wrangling between the "formal" and the "natural" schools of gardening is a very old business. Pope, Addison, and Horace Walpole led the revolt against formal gardening, perfected, though not founded, by the great Le Nôtre. Under their influence a powerful "landscape" school grew up, taught by Kent, "Capability" Brown, Humphrey Repton, and others. At various periods there have been violent reactions. The middle of the nineteenth century found the bedding system in vogue, the end saw a wave of hardy plant culture sweep over the country.

It was acutely remarked by Lord Byron that English gardening has grown up rather under the influence of our great writers than of our landscape painters. He doubtless had particularly in mind the satires of Pope. But in submitting themselves to the influence of the poet of Twickenham, our forefathers committed themselves to developments by a negative process. Instead of progressing by working to an ideal they did so by avoiding what was set up as an enormity. Now, the negative process in an art so inherently constructive and plastic as gardening has transparent defects. A nation could never build up its character merely by criticising the defects of other countries. Gardening is essentially a working art. It cannot be directed from the study. It lives of its own inspiration. It is because the literature of gardening is so extensive that the execution of it is so imperfect.

How slowly the negative system works is shown by the fact that although some 200 years have elapsed since Pope's pungent satire at the expense of clipped trees was penned, the early years of the twentieth century have seen a considerable extension of topiary. We really ought to busy ourselves in building up beautiful gardens with the help of our mother wit, and in consonance with our immediate circumstances and surroundings, and not worry ourselves with the strife of factions. English gardening will advance, and gradually evolve a national character, when people learn that their first lesson in the making of gardens is to go forth into the open air and straightway turn a sod, rather than to deride, by the fireside, the work of London and Wise.

The jangling of the factions is as tiresome as it is futile. In view of the antiquity of the crusade against formal gardening the pretension of some modern critics is painful. It might be thought that such beings as Pope and Addison had never existed. We are asked to believe that "gardening by nature" is a recent discovery, like wireless telegraphy and radium. Gardens are packed with huge stones until they resemble the face of a quarry. Cataracts of a pint or two of water fling their tumultuous spray into a ten-inch basin. Any weed becomes a gem so long as it comes from the mountains.

One may loathe the bedding system and topiary, and love hardy flowers, without acknowledging the dilettantism of many modern writers. There are quarry-and-cataract gardens which are quite as much affectations as, and more costly than, formal gardens. They domineer over the natural character of the place, which is pummelled and packed until it assumes a form that is totally foreign and incongruous.

A beautiful garden cannot be made out of timeworn sarcasms at the expense of ribbon borders and platitudes about the formality of clipped trees. It calls for real, concentrated effort. It demands the best that is in a man or woman.

Until we have learned that the plant comes first - that only when it is well grown, and given a suitable environment, is proper gardening carried on - we have not learned what garden art means. One may see two tons of stone used to form a corner for one tuft of Primula rosea! Nature does not generally do this sort of thing, and when she does she is teaching us not what to imitate, but what to avoid. Nature, indeed, may be a good theorist, but a bad gardener. She does not grow good plants, as a rule. She crams them together, so that they become weak and drawn, flower prematurely, and soon run to seed. Her object is not beauty, but reproduction.

With the never-ending feud between the formal and the quarry-and-cataract factions, the modern flower gardener has no real concern. He is well advised who cries: "A plague on both your houses," pursues his own course, and turns his attention to what is, after all, the real task - the selection of as many good plants as he can cultivate well, and giving them the best conditions for growing in a healthful and beautiful way.

By giving plants free scope and abundance of food they attain to dimensions, and give a quality of bloom, totally unsuspected by those who treat them in the ordinary way. An acre of garden could be maintained in magnificent beauty for many months of the year at a small annual cost by choosing, besides shrubs, such things as Ox-Eye Daisies, Paeonies, Goat's Rues, Boltonia asteroides, Statices, Sunflowers, Pinks, Heleniums, Poppies, Phloxes, Pyrethrums, Foxgloves, Snapdragons, Columbines, Michaelmas Daisies in great variety, and Kniphofias - plants which assume stately proportions, or bloom long and profusely, and are readily split up, when generously handled.

Inexpensive gardening - a huge clump of boltonia asteroides in the author's garden, showing the effects of culture.

Fig. Inexpensive gardening - a huge clump of boltonia asteroides in the author's garden, showing the effects of culture. These bold masses give splendid effects at small cost.

Inexpensive gardening - a clump of Michaelmas Daisy in the author's garden, about 8 feet across.

Fig. Inexpensive gardening - a clump of Michaelmas Daisy in the author's garden, about 8 feet across.

With beds and borders of good hardy plants, large or small according to the area of the garden, with an arch of Roses here, a pillar of Clematises there, a clump of Sweet Peas yonder, a quiet pool, a modest rock bed, the whole provided with a suitable foil of good turf, a beautiful garden is secured and maintained at a small cost, as "Beautiful Gardens" will essay to prove.