Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II SEATS The seat is the earliest form of garden furniture, and between the felled tree-stump, which served our ancestors as a convenient resting-place, and the elaborate structures which are to be seen in modern gardens, there are a great variety of styles—good, bad, and indifferent. Notwithstanding the progress which has been made in the decorative arts of this country during the last decade, the furniture intended for our gardens still retains its reputation for being hopelessly crude and inartistic. Especially so is this the case with the class which we are now considering, and of which William Robinson has said, " It is rare to see a garden seat that is not an eyesore." Why this should be so is somewhat difficult to understand, for neither in design nor construction is there any great difficulty to overcome. The fact that a large proportion of garden-seats are home-made proves that the fault must occur in the style adopted, rather than in the matter of workmanship. One of the indirect reasons for comments such as the above, is probably due to a certain mock-professionalism, which seems to be an easily acquired attribute of some of our latter-day amateurs. They do not care for much beauty in the garden as a whole, but are ambitious to remember the Latin names of all their plants, the ancestors of each, and as many sub-varieties as possible. Their beds are turned into nursery plots, the herbaceous flowers in the borderare all provided with painted labels, and it is plainly evident that the ultimate ambition of such gardeners is a certificate of merit at the next flower show. In these cases it is hardly a matter for surprise that little thought is bestowed on the selection and arrangement of such apparently unimportant trifles as seats and other articles of furnitu...