“Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.”
And this latest fancy is itself falling into the further degradation of _carpet_-bedding. That a carpet should imitate a flower-bed is one thing; years ago in _Casa Guidi Windows_, Mrs. Browning wrote of some carpets, where
This may be well enough; but who wants flower-beds to look like carpets? They may strike you at first as being ingenious, and even pretty, but the feeling is at once followed by a sense of their essential debasement as regards gardening. No flower is permitted, and the glorification of stonecrops and houseleeks is the chief result. But indeed the geometrical figures of the carpet-bedding are not the worst. The gardeners are now trying their skill in designs on their carpet-beds, and names, mottoes, coats of arms, and other frivolities, are becoming common. The most stupid follies of the Topiarian age were graceful and sensible compared to this. It is less childish to trim a yew-tree into a peacock than to arrange your sedums and alternantheras to look like animals on a badly-woven carpet. Nor has the absurdity even the merit of being original. It is really an old French invention, and about the time of Henry IV. the gardens at Fontainebleau and Chantilly were known for their quaint devices in flowers, their ships, armorial bearings, and cyphers interlaced. The whole matter has been well summed up by Sir Joseph Hooker, who writes:
“It is indeed astonishing that the asters, helianthus, rudbeckias, silphiums, and numberless other fine North American plants, all so easily grown and so handsome, should be entirely neglected in English gardens, and this in favour of carpets, hearthrugs, and ribbons, forming patterns of violent colours, which, though admired for being the fashion on the lawn and borders of our gardens and grounds, would not be tolerated on the floor of a drawing-room or boudoir.”[4]
Well, as we can do nothing worse in this direction, we may at last hope for a reaction, in which a new school, with some regard to nature, but without the extravagance of the old “picturesque” gardeners, may bring us back to good taste and common sense.
It is of course absolutely impossible to form even an estimate of the number of bedding-out plants used in our gardens during a single season, to be discarded when the season ends. It must be something enormous. One single florist in the neighbourhood of London sends to market annually more than 80,000 plants of one description of pelargonium alone. It is calculated that the bedding-out of a single good-sized garden will take at least 100,000 plants to make it effective.