The Dutch are now wholly practical. Their reputation as gardeners has
become a commercial one, resting upon the fortunate discovery that the
tulip and the hyacinth thrive in the sandy soil about Haarlem. For
flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing. Their
cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages. You
never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary
labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow
flowers for æsthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive
a hobby. Æsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the
matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on
their houses, their mills and their boats. What is pretty is old--as
indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens. Modern
Dutch architecture is without attraction, modern Delft porcelain a
thing to cry over.

If any one would know how an old formal Dutch garden looked, there is
a model one at the back of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. But the art
is no more practised. A few circular beds in the lawn, surrounded
by high wire netting--that is for the most part the modern notion
of gardening. In an interesting report of a visit paid to the
Netherlands and France in 1817 by the secretary of the Caledonia
Horticultural Society and some congenial companions, may be read
excellent descriptions of old Dutch gardening, which even then was
a thing of the past. Here is the account of a typical formal garden,
near Utrecht: "The large divisions of the garden are made by tall and
thick hedges of beech, hornbeam, and oak, variously shaped, having
been tied to frames and thus trained, with the aid of the shears, to
the desired form. The smaller divisions are made by hedges of yew and
box, which in thickness and density resemble walls of brick. Grottoes
and fountains are some of the principal ornaments. The grottoes are