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Is outside of tin- enclosure distant hills, the sky, the sound cattle, or whatever. Third, enjoyment of a garden type is olifrotlos several, sometimes all, of the perceptual senses: we the “colours of the flowers, smell their perfume, hear them steeling in the breeze, even feel the textures on our fingers. By xintrast, a painting is set before the spectator, an object contained in a frame, which engages vision alone among the senses.5 Pointing to these differences in effect reminds us of ways in which gardens are more akin to natural places than to objets dart. But it would be a mistake to then assimilate garden appreciation to that of nature. Kant, recall, held that gardens are only beautiful when they ‘look like Nature’, but even in the case of English’ gardens we are rarely unaware that these are gardens, and not wild or uncultivated places. If it is nature at all that we appreciate in such cases, this is ‘nature-as-affected-by-humanity’.6 By contrast, it is usually integral to the enjoyment of raw, wild nature that it is not ‘affected-by-humanity’. That is why the lover of nature is liable to be disappointed, his enjoyment eroded, on discovering that what he took to be a natural scene is a ‘fake’, the product of artefact and not natural processes.
This consideration in effect reminds us of ways in which gardens are more akin to works of art than to nature. That reminder, taken together with the earlier and opposite reminder of ways in which gardens are closer to natural places than to works of art, makes it tempting to go for a compromise – to fuse together, while at the same time moderating, the two attempts at assimilation. Garden appreciation, so the idea goes, factors out into two “(appreciation of art and of nature. This idea gardens is to be assimilated to that, the assimilation is towards the enjoyment

V When recalling remarks by Alexander Pope, Gertrul describe herself as ‘paintfingl living pictures, or as paint, a landscape with living things’, she clearly us to expc, i her gardens somewhat as we do paintings. Properly to
enjoy a garden is to bring to bear upon it the modes of appreciation elicited by works of art. For Immanuel Kant, by contrast,
the gardens that merit our appraisal – notably informal, ‘English
gardens’ – are those which, though the products of artistry, are
‘only beautiful … [because they] look like Nature’. In his view,
we enjoy such gardens for the same reason we do scenes of
untamed nature: they inspire the ‘play’ of our mental faculties,
‘free from all constraints of arbitrary rules’.( Many later writers,
while not subscribing to Kant’s particular diagnosis of nature’s
appeal, have agreed with him in comparing the admiration of
gardens with mat of the natural, not the artefactual, world.
How should we judge these attempts to assimilate garden appreciation to art and to nature appreciation? No one would or should deny that, at certain moments or in certain moods, a per-НЬ son may be admiring a garden, or some part of it, on grounds

reduced to appreciation of these components natural or tual, since it is only as components of a larger whole trailtu,Now can be properly appreciated can, indeed. Ihis singled out identified as significant components of the garden. Compare the claim that enjoyment of a piece of music is reducible to enjoyment of the phrases that compose it. What is wrong with this claim, among other things, is that it is only as lying parts of the whole piece that these phrases are significant, that indeed lluarc phrases at all. The same sequence ol notes occurring another piece might not even constitute a musical phrase. Let me illustrate the point I am dnung at. Suppose I nonce a
particular drift of flowers in a Ixd, and duly record my admirtion for thc garden designer’s artistry. Now the ven same collection of flowers placed differently in another garden might not have attracted inv notice and admiration at all: indeed, it might
not constitute a drift at all. but instead be part ol a larger one, a sequence of smaller ones punctuated as they arc, let s suppose,
bv a number of urns. As another illustration, consider the watches … converses in a sense