The
only poetic evanescence is the evanescence that is inevitable. An
unnecessary evanescence in things we make is bad art. If I remember the
story correctly, it was to a Roman lady that Benvenuto Cellini took the
exquisite waxen model of some piece of goldsmithing she had commissioned
him to execute for her. So delighted was she with this mere model that
she longed to keep it and called it the perfection of art, or some such
word. But Benvenuto said, No, he could not claim for it the high name of
art until he should have reproduced it in gold, that being the most
worthy material in which it would endure the use for which it was
designed.
Unless the great Italian was in error, then, a garden ought not to be so
largely made up of plants which perish with the summer as to be, at
their death, no longer a garden. Said that harsh-spoken judge whom we
have already once or twice quoted--that shepherd's-dog of a judge--at
one of the annual bestowals of our Carnegie garden prizes:
"Almost any planting about the base of a building, fence or wall is
better than none; but for this purpose shrubs are far better than annual
flowers. Annuals do not sufficiently mask the hard, offensive
right-angles of the structure's corners or of the line whence it starts
up from the ground. And even if sometimes they do, they take so long to
grow enough to do it, and are so soon gone with the first cold blast,
that the things they are to hide are for the most of the year not
hidden.
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