It must be obvious that gardening, the object of which is the production of a succession of varied pictures which, being inspired by the observation of Nature in her many moods, might appeal to the artistic taste of a painter or stir the emotion of a poet, presents difficulties undreamt of by the flower-bed manufacturers of fifty or sixty years ago. Their gardening was all done with compasses and straight-edge, and the geometrical result, the eccentric “knottes” worked out in alternantheras, ecneverias, golden feather and the like, savoured of nothing nearer to nature than the Tottenham Court Road. Those were the days in which the garden, like the kitchen, was the special province of the mistress of the house. Of the latter she might know something, of the former generally nothing; and the consequence was that it was handed over to men, who, though they might be most admirable cultivators, had had no artistic training, had not had the opportunity of learning by travel, and were content to carry on certain rule-of-thumb traditions, which turned out every man’s garden in the likeness of that of every other man. In the uniformly unrelieved brilliancy of geraniums, verbenas and calceolarias, of imagination or poetry there was not a trace—not even the merit of invention. In his brilliant book, “Form and Colour,” Mr. March Phillips divides the human mind into two great categories—the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual faculty is characteristic of the West, the emotional faculty prevails in the East. Next comes the question of Form and Colour in Art. “Form,” he says, “has dominated Art whenever and wherever the intellectual faculty was dominant in life; colour has dominated Art whenever and wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life.” Later in the book, when speaking of the contrast between the Art of the West and the Art of the East, he proceeds: “Form, as we were saying, is chiefly a matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. _Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas._ [My italics.] It is emotional and appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. And this being so, it seems natural that the Western temperament, intellectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form rather than in colour; while the Eastern, sensuous rather than intellectual, should excel in colour rather than in form.” This theory of colour and form gives us much food for thought, and it is impossible not to be struck by the aptness with which it may be applied to the gardener’s craft. The gorgeous colour of the one school of gardening appeals directly to the senses, and, like other similar appeals where there is no relief from monotony, it soon satiates and wearies.