The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds

Description from Amazon

The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds: Design and Arrangement Followed (Classic Reprint) [Paperback]

William Robinson (Author)

This book is the muster of various once forlorn hopes and skirmishing parties now united with better arms and larger aims, and its beginnings may have an interest for others. I came to London just when the Royal Horticultural Society sgarden at Kensington was being laid out, a series of elaborate patterns set at different levels, and the Crystal Palace, in its glory, was described by the Press of the day to be the most wonderful instance of modern gardening water-temples, water-paths, vast stone basins and all the theatrical gardening of Versailles reproduced inS urrey. There was little or no reason admitted into garden design :the same poor imitation of the Italian garden being set down in all sorts of positions. If the place did not suit the style, the ground had to be bolstered up in some way so that the plan might be carried out a costly way to get an often ridiculous result. The great writers of the past had laughed the carpenters rule out of the parks of England, and pictures arose where they were once impossible; but the ugliness of the garden about the house was assumed to be an essential part of the thing itself, removing that for ever from the sympathies of artistic people. The flower garden planting was made up of a few kinds of flowers which people were proud to put out in thousands and tens of thousands, and with these, patterns, more or less elaborate, were carried out in every garden save the very poorest cottage garden.