"Some heavy oak timber-work forms a structural part of the inner main framing of the house. Posts, beams, braces, as well as doors and their frames, window-frames and mullions, stairs and some floors, are of good English oak, grown in the neighbourhood. I suppose a great London builder could not produce such work. He does not go into the woods and buy the standing timber, and season it slowly in a roomy yard for so many years, and then go round with the architect's drawing and choose the piece that exactly suits the purpose. The old country builder, when he has to get out a cambered beam or a curved brace, goes round his yard and looks out the log that grew in the actual shape, and taking off two outer slabs by handwork in the sawpit, chops it roughly to shape with his side-axe and works it to the finished face with the adze, so that the completed work shall for ever bear the evidence of his skill in the use of these grand old tools, and show a treatment absolutely in sympathy with the nature and quality of the material."

"It is not so much that people are unobservant, but that from the want of the necessary training they cannot see or receive direct from nature what is seen by the artist, and the only natural pictures that strike them are those that present some unusual strength or mass of positive colourm such as a brilliant sunset, or a group of trees in yellow glory of autumn colouring, or a field of poppies, or an orchard bearing its load of bloom. To the untrained eyes the much more numerous and delicate of Nature's pictoral moods or incidents can only be enjoyed or understood when presented in the form of a painted picture by the artist who understands Nature's speech and can act as her interpreter."

"These plants, with the exception of the Cuckoo-flower, are among those most often found in gardens, but it is very rarely that they are used thoughtfully or intelligently, or in such a way as to produce the simple pictoral effect to which they so readily lend themselves. This planting of white and purple colouring I would back with plants or shrubs of dark foliage, and the path should be so directed into the Wall-flower garden, by passing through a turn or a tunnelled arch of Yew or some other dusky growth, that the one is not seen from the other; but so that the eye, attuned to the cold, fresh colouring of the white and purple, should be in the very best state to receive and enjoy the sumptuous splendour of the region beyond. I am not sure that the return journey would not present the more brilliant picture of the two, for I have often observed in passing from warm colouring to cold, that the eye receives a kind of delightful shock of surprise that colour can be so strong and so pure and so altogether satisfying. And in these ways one gets to know how to use colour to the best garden effects. It is a kind of optical gastronomy; this preparation and presentation of food for the eye in arrangements that are both wholesome and agreeable, and in which each course is so designed that it is the best possible preparation for the next to come."

"Some eight yards farther down the lane one sees how an Oak gets over the same difficulty. Here there is no main supporting column, but it has thrown down a number of roots -- about twenty of from three to six inches diameter, and many lesser ones. They fork and lace and intertwine in a kind of complicated web -- where they touch they become welded together, greatly to the increase of strength and bearing power. The actual weight of the tree stands over space, so much has the sandy bank crumbled away under the butt. The whole arrangement is evidently effectual, for there the whole tree stands, a well-grown Oak with a two-foot-thick trunk, and by no means young, for I can remeber it looking nearly the same all my life. But the method of the Oak is much less satisfactory and convincing to the eye and also less graceful than that of the Beech, just as the tree itself has a more rugged character. For the Beech always seems to me to be the true aristocrat among trees, and in all circumstances to bear himself with the graceful dignity that befits his high estate."

"Through the commonest hedgerow it will feel its way, and lightly twine a crown of glory on the head of the humblest vegetation; and when in our hills a moss-grown Thorn or Juniper dies of old age, the Woodbine will give it glorious burial, covering the hoary branches with a freshness of young life and a generous and gladly-given wreathing of sweetest bloom."

"When I advised the planting of the common Heath (Calluma) as a groundwork of the Briers, it was with no thought of its flowering, for that is not till August, but for the sake of its quiet leaf-colouring; grey-green when the Briers bloom, and later of a sober rustiness; its own change of colouring keeping pace with that of the small Rose bushes. In neither case do the companion plants imitate or match each other in colour, but both advance in the progress of the year's transformation by such a sequence of quiet harmonies, that at every season each is the better for the nearness of the other."

"In Wood and Garden, I explained rather at length the way I thought best of arranging the sequence of colour in a large border of hardy flowers, namely, in a gradual progressio of colour-harmony in the case of the red and yellow flowers, whose numbers preponderate among those we have to choose from; but saying that as far as my own understanding of the colour-requirements of flowers went, it was better to treat blues with contrasts rather than with harmonies. And I had observed, when at one point, from a little distance, I could see in company the pure deep orange of the Herring-Lilies (Lilium croccum) with the brilliant blue of some full-blue Delphiniums, how splendid, although audacious, the mixture was, and immediately noted it, so as to take full advantage of the observation when planting-time came. In the autumn, two of the large patches of Lilies were therefore taken up and grouped in front of, and partly among, the Delphiniums; and even though neither had come to anything like full strength in the past summer (the first year after removal), yet I could see already how grandly they went together, and how well worth doing and recommending such a mixture was. The Delphiniums should be of a full deep-blue colour, not perhaps the very darkest, and not any with a purple shade."