Before we go inside our house, nay, before we look at its outside,
we may consider its garden, chiefly with reference to town
gardening; which, indeed, I, in common, I suppose, with most others
who have tried it, have found uphill work enough--all the more as in
our part of the world few indeed have any mercy upon the one thing
necessary for decent life in a town, its trees; till we have come to
this, that one trembles at the very sound of an axe as one sits at
one's work at home. However, uphill work or not, the town garden
must not be neglected if we are to be in earnest in making the best
of it.

Now I am bound to say town gardeners generally do rather the reverse
of that: our suburban gardeners in London, for instance, oftenest
wind about their little bit of gravel walk and grass plot in
ridiculous imitation of an ugly big garden of the landscape-
gardening style, and then with a strange perversity fill up the
spaces with the most formal plants they can get; whereas the merest
common sense should have taught them to lay out their morsel of
ground in the simplest way, to fence it as orderly as might be, one
part from the other (if it be big enough for that) and the whole
from the road, and then to fill up the flower-growing space with
things that are free and interesting in their growth, leaving nature
to do the desired complexity, which she will certainly not fail to
do if we do not desert her for the florist, who, I must say, has
made it harder work than it should be to get the best of flowers.

It is scarcely a digression to note his way of dealing with flowers,
which, moreover, gives us an apt illustration of that change without
thought of beauty, change for the sake of change, which has played
such a great part in the degradation of art in all times. So I ask