As to colour in gardens.  Flowers in masses are mighty strong colour, and if not used with a great deal of caution are very destructive to pleasure in gardening.  On the whole, I think the best and safest plan is to mix up your flowers, and rather eschew great masses of colour—­in combination I mean.  But there are some flowers (inventions of men, i.e. florists) which are bad colour altogether, and not to be used at all.  Scarlet geraniums, for instance, or the yellow calceolaria, which indeed are not uncommonly grown together profusely, in order, I suppose, to show that even flowers can be thoroughly ugly.

Another thing also much too commonly seen is an aberration of the human mind, which otherwise I should have been ashamed to warn you of.  It is technically called carpet-gardening.  Need I explain it further?  I had rather not, for when I think of it even when I am quite alone I blush with shame at the thought.

I am afraid it is specially necessary in these days when making the best of it is a hard job, and when the ordinary iron hurdles are so common and so destructive of any kind of beauty in a garden, to say when you fence anything in a garden use a live hedge, or stones set flatwise (as they do in some parts of the Cotswold country), or timber, or wattle, or, in short, anything but iron. {10}

And now to sum up as to a garden.  Large or small, it should look both orderly and rich.  It should be well fenced from the outside world.  It should by no means imitate either the wilfulness or the wildness of Nature, but should look like a thing never to be seen except near a house.  It should, in fact, look like a part of the house.  It follows from this that no private pleasure-garden should be very big, and a public garden should be divided and made to look like so many flower-closes in a meadow, or a wood, or amidst the pavement.

It will be a key to right thinking about gardens if you consider in what kind of places a garden is most desired.  In a very beautiful country, especially if it be mountainous, we can do without it well enough; whereas in a flat and dull country we crave after it, and there it is often the very making of the homestead.  While in great towns, gardens, both private and public, are positive necessities if the citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind.

So much for the garden, of which, since I have said that it ought to be part of the house, I hope I have not spoken too much.

Now, as to the outside of our makeshift house, I fear it is too ugly to keep us long.  Let what painting you have to do about it be as simple as possible, and be chiefly white or whitish; for when a building is ugly in form it will bear no decoration, and to mark its parts by varying colour will be the way to bring out its ugliness.  So I don’t advise you to paint your houses blood-red and chocolate with white facings, as seems to be getting the fashion in some parts of London.  You should, however, always paint your sash-bars and window-frames white to break up the dreary space of window somewhat.  The only other thing I have to say, is to warn you against using at all a hot brownish-red, which some decorators are very fond of.  Till some one invents a better name for it, let us call it cockroach colour, and have naught to do with it.