A Garden of Peace: A Medley in QuietudeMoore, Frank Frankfort
General
A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Gardens -- Fiction
Why not, indeed? The more I thought over the matter the more reconciled
I became to the transformation of the house lawn. I felt as I fancy the
father of a well-beloved daughter must feel when she tells him that
she has promised to marry the son of the house at the other side of
his paddock. He is reconciled to the idea of parting with her by the
reflection that she will still be living beyond the fence, and that
he will enjoy communion with her under altered conditions. That is the
difference between parting _with_ a person and parting _from_ a person.
And now, when I looked at the house lawn, I saw that it had no business
to be there. It was an element of incongruity. It made the house look as
if it were built in the middle of a field. A field is all very well in
its place, and a house is all very well in its place, but the place of
the house is not in the middle of a field. It looks its worst there and
the field looks its worst when the house is overlooking it.
I think that it is this impression of incongruity that has made what is
called The Formal Garden a necessity of these days. We want a treatment
that will take away from the abruptness of the mass of bricks and mortar
rising straight up from the simplest of Nature's elements. We want a
hyphenated House-and-Garden which we can look on as one and indivisible,
like the First French Republic.
In short, I think that the making of the Formal Garden is the marriage
ceremony that unites the house to its site, “and the twain shall be one
flesh.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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