For
flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing. Their
cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages. You
never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary
labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow
flowers for aesthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive
a hobby. AEsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the
matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on
their houses, their mills and their boats. What is pretty is old--as
indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens. Modern
Dutch architecture is without attraction, modern Delft porcelain a
thing to cry over.
If any one would know how an old formal Dutch garden looked, there is
a model one at the back of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. But the art
is no more practised. A few circular beds in the lawn, surrounded
by high wire netting--that is for the most part the modern notion
of gardening. In an interesting report of a visit paid to the
Netherlands and France in 1817 by the secretary of the Caledonia
Horticultural Society and some congenial companions, may be read
excellent descriptions of old Dutch gardening, which even then was
a thing of the past.
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