Yet the later prizes fell
to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years
before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler
beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the
next far greater advances _toward_ artistic excellence. In the very next
year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden
whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying
its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges
described as "particularly forlorn conditions."
Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the
gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right
gardeners--these are what our prizes and honors are for. Progress first,
perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality,
nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely
that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one
or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the
prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this
tendency forced upon us.
About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening
but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe
way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden.
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