The diplomatists, who opened up Japan in 1858, the pioneers of trade, who have penetrated into the secret places of Western China, carrying their lives in their hands, have all added to our wealth of plants, both in form and colour, but chiefly in colour. When we see the glorious velvety shafts of Lawson’s Cypress, or _Libocedrous decurrens_, shooting up heavenward like church spires, when we look upon the great American conifers, so rich and so various, or among the lowlier plants, are startled by the huge leaves of the Chilian Gunneras, we cannot but admit that for form we have to thank the West. In a later chapter, in the course of a fascinating disquisition on Byzantine architecture, Mr. Phillips goes on to say: “We must recognize that between these ideas of colour and softness there is something more than an accidental connection ... softness and colour go together as naturally as hardness and form.” These are words which might be applied with special fitness to the garden. But although form is of its very essence hard, so far as outlines are concerned, we are not without one corrective which softens and subdues it. That corrective is atmosphere. I hold, and I think that most fellow-craftsmen, if I may dare to reckon myself among gardeners, will agree with me, that background is absolutely essential to success; yet if you place a statue, or plant a specimen tree, immediately against the finest background that imagination could desire, it will remain hard and shorn of much of its charm, because it will lack the softening influence of atmosphere. I know no better illustration of this than the way in which the Venus of Milo is shown at the Louvre. It is so skilfully placed that the air plays all round it, and the outlines of the marble melt, as it were, into the surrounding atmosphere. Were it pressed, as statues so often are, close against a curtain or a dead wall, the supreme beauty of the goddess would be cruelly sacrificed. The form, the inspiration of the sculptor, would be there, but the hardness of the material would be unredeemed; it would represent death instead of life. That is why so many photographic portraits fail to render beauty. The model is placed immediately in front of a screen—all sense of aerial perspective is lost—and the result is, from an artistic point of view, a deadly failure, even should the photograph be technically perfect, so far as optics and chemistry are concerned. No composition is good, or even tolerable, where aerial perspective is neglected, and that is as true in gardening as it is in the plastic arts.