Art Out-Of-Doors; Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The Home-Grounds " The first law of a painting and of a picture on the soil is to be a whole. . . . Without principles and without discernment one never attains veritable beauty." ?Edouard Andre. " That is best which lieth nearest, Shape from that thy work of art." ?Longfellow. [HE union?a happy marriage it should be?between the house beautiful and the ground near it," says a recent English writer, " is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past; and the best ways of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow larger, and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them." This writer is an enthusiast for " natural " gardening methods, so we are not surprised to find that, in speaking of the ground near a country-house, he should say little about harmonizing it with the house itself, but much about uniting it agreeably with the landscape beyond its own borders. He calls this ground "the garden," which is its right old-fashioned name. But, in America at least, "garden" is most generally understood as meaning very small grounds,or an enclosure of some sort where plants are grown chiefly for the sake of their own individual beauties; and so, with us, "home- grounds " is a better term when we want to speak more broadly. Speaking, then, of all the grounds near" the house, this Englishman explains that there are situations, as on the hill-sides of Italy, where the character of the spot prescribes a formal, semi-artificial kind of treatment. But, he continues, " the lawn is the heart of the true English garden, and as essential as the terrace is to the gardens on the steep hills;'' and, in general, these words are true for America as well. In fact, there is less need in America than in England to protest ag...