LANDSCAPE
ARCHITECTURE

REEF

POINT

GARDENS

LIBRARY

The Gift of Beatrix Farrand

to the General Library
University of California,Berkeley

GARDEN-CRAFT

OLD AND NEW

GARDEN-CRAFT

OLD AND NEW

BY THE LATE

JOHN D. SEDDING

WITH MEMORIAL NOTICE BY THE

REV. E. F. RUSSELL

SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LT?

PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1891

LANDSCAPE
HlTECTURE

Add to Lib.
Farrand

/•*•?/

PREFACE.

" What am I to say for my book?" asks Mr.
Stevenson in the Preface to "An Inland Voyage"
" Caleb and Joshua brought back from Palestine a
formidable bunch of grapes ; alas ! my book produces
naught so nourishing ; and, for the matter of that, we
live in an age when people prefer a definition to any
quantity of fruit"

As this apology is so uncalled for in the case of this
fruitful little volume, I would venture to purloin it, and
apply it where it is wholly suitable. Here, the critic will
say, is an architect who makes gardens for the houses he
builds, writing upon his proper craft, pandering to that
popular preference for a definition of which Mr. Steven-
son speaks, by offering descriptions of what he thinks a
fine garden should be', instead of useful figured plans of
its beauties!

And yet, to tell truth, it is more my subject than
myself that is to blame if my book be unpractical.
Once upon a time complete in itself, as a brief treatise
upon the technics of gardening delivered to my brethren
of the Art-workers Guild a year ago, the essay had no
sooner arrived with me at home, than it fell to pieces,
lost gravity and compactness, and became a garden-
plaything — a sort of gardeners ' ' open letter, " to take

b

281

vi PREFACE.

loose pages as fancies occurred. So have these errant
thoughts, jotted down in the broken leisure of a busy
life, grown solid unawares and expanded into a would-
be-serious contribution to garden-literature.

Following upon the original lines of the Essay on the
For and Against of Modern Gardening, I became the
more confirmed as to the general rightness of the old
ways of applying Art, and of interpreting Nature the
more I studied old gardens and the point of view of
their makers ; until I now appear as advocate of old
types of design, which, I am persuaded, are more con-
sonant with the traditions of English life, and more
suitable to an English homestead than some now in
vogue.

The old-fashioned garden, whatever its failings in
the eyes of the modern landscape-gardener (great is
the poverty of his . invention), represents one of the
pleasures of England, one of the charms of that quiet
beautiful life of bygone times that I, for one, would
fain see revived. And judged even as pieces of handi-
craft, apart from their poetic interest, these gardens are
worthy of careful study. They embody ideas of ancient
worth ; they evidence fine aims and heroic efforts ; they
exemplify traditions that are the net result of a long pro-
bation. Better still, they render into tangible shapes
old moods of mind that English landscape has inspired;
they testify to old devotion to the scenery of our native
land, and illustrate old attempts to idealise its pleasant
traits.

Because the old gardens are what they are — beau-
tiful yesterday, beautiful to-day, and beautiful always —

PREFACE.

we do well to turn to them, not to copy their exact lines,
nor to limit ourselves to the range of their ornament and
effects, but to glean hints for our garden-enterprise to-
day, to drink of their spirit, to gain impulsion from
them. As often as not, the forgotten field proves the
richest of pastures.

J. D. S.

THE CROFT, WEST WICKHAM, KENT,
Oct. 8, 1890.

MEMOIR.

THE Manuscript of this book was placed complete in
the hands of his publishers by John Sedding. He did not
live to see its production.

At the wish of his family and friends, I have, with help
from others, set down some memories and impressions of
my friend.

My acquaintance with John Sedding dates from the
year 1875. He was then 37 years of age, and had been
practising as an architect almost exclusively in the South-
West of England. The foundations of this practice were
laid by his equally talented brother, Edmund Sedding, who,
like himself, had received his training in the office of Mr.
Street. Edmund died in 1868, and John took up the
business, but his clients were so few, and the prospect of an
• increase in their number so little encouraging, that he left
Bristol and came to London, and here I first met him. He
had just taken a house in Charlotte Street, Bedford Square,
and the house served him on starting both for home and
office.

The first years in London proved no exception to the
rule of first years, they were more or less a time of struggle
and anxiety. John Sedding's happy, buoyant nature, his
joy in his art, and invincible faith in his mission, did
much to carry him through all difficulties. But both at
this time, and all through his life, he owed much, very
much, to the brave hopefulness and wise love of his wife.

MEMOIR.

Rose Sedding, a daughter of Canon Tinling, of Gloucester,
lives in the memory of those who knew her as an impersona-
tion of singular spiritual beauty and sweetness. Gentle
and refined, sensitive and sympathetic to an unusual
degree, there was no lack in her of the sterner stuff of
character — force, courage, and endurance. John Sedding
leaned upon his wife ; indeed, I cannot think of him with-
out her, or guess how much of his success is due to what
she was to him. Two days before his death he said to me,
" I have to thank God for the happiest of homes, and the
sweetest of wives."

Many will remember with gratitude the little home in
Charlotte Street, as the scene of some of the pleasantest
and most refreshing hours they have ever known. John
Sedding had the gift of attracting young men, artists and
others, to himself, and of entering speedily into the friend-
liest relations with them. He met them with such taking
frankness, such unaffected warmth of welcome, that they
surrendered to him at once, and were at once at ease with
him and happy.

On Sundays, when the religious duties of the day were
over, he was wont to gather a certain number of these
young fellows to spend the evening at his house. No one
of those who were privileged to be of the party can forget
the charming hospitality of these evenings. The apparatus
was so simple, the result so delightful ; an entire absence
of display, and yet no element of perfect entertainment
wanting. On these occasions, when supper was over, Mrs.
Sedding usually played for us with great discernment and
feeling the difficult music of Beethoven, Grieg, Chopin, and
others, and sometimes she sang. More than one friendship
among their guests grew out of these happy evenings.

In course of time the increase of his family and the
concurrent increase of his practice obliged him to remove,
first his office to Oxford Street, and later on his home

MEMOIR.

to the larger, purer air of a country house in the little
village of West Wickham, Kent. This house he con-
tinued to occupy until his death. Work of all kinds now
began to flow in upon him, not rapidly, but by steady in-
crease. His rich faculty of invention, his wide knowledge,
his skill in the manipulation of natural forms, the fine
quality of his taste, were becoming more and more known.
He produced in large numbers designs for wall-papers, for
decoration, and for embroidery. These designs were never
repetitions of old examples, nor were they a rechauffe" of
his own previous work. Something of his soul he put into
all that he undertook, hence his work was never common-
place, and scarcely needed signature to be known as his,
so unmistakably did it bear his stamp, the " marque de
fabrique," of his individuality.

I have known few men so well able as he to press
flowers into all manner of decorative service, in metal, wood,
stone or panel, and in needlework. He understood them,
and could handle them with perfect ease and freedom,
each flower in his design seeming to fall naturally into its
appointed place. Without transgressing the natural limits
of the material employed, he yet never failed to give to
each its own essential characteristics, its gesture, and its
style. Flowers were indeed passionately loved, and most
reverently, patiently studied by him. He would spend
many hours out of his summer holiday in making careful
studies of a single plant, or spray of foliage, painting them,
as Mr. Ruskin had taught him, in siena and white, or
in violet-carmine and white. Leaves and flowers were,
in fact, almost his only school of decorative design.

This is not the place to attempt any formal exposition
of John Sedding's views on Art and the aims of Art.
They can be found distinctly stated and amply, often
brilliantly, illustrated in his Lectures and Addresses,
of which some have appeared in the architectural papers

xii MEMOIR.

and some are still in manuscript* But short of this formal
statement, it may prove not uninteresting to note some
characters of his work which impressed us.

Following no systematic order, we note first his pro-
found sympathy with ancient work, and with ancient work
of all periods that might be called periods of living Art.
He never lost an opportunity of visiting and intently study-
ing ancient buildings, sketching them, and measuring them
with extraordinary care, minuteness, and patience. " On
one occasion," writes Mr. Lethaby, " when we were hurried
he said, ' We cannot go, it is life to us.' " A long array
of sketch-books, crowded with studies and memoranda,
remains to bear witness to his industry. In spite of
this extensive knowledge, and copious record of old work,
he never literally reproduced it. The unacknowledged
plagiarisms of Art were in his judgment as dishonest as
plagiarisms in literature, and as hopelessly dead. " He
used old forms," writes Mr. Longden, " in a plastic way, and
moulded them to his requirements, never exactly repro-
ducing the old work, which he loved to draw and study, but
making it his starting-point for new developments. This
caused great difference of opinion as to the merit of his
work, very able and skilful judges who look at style from
the traditional point of view being displeased by his de-
signs, while others who may be said to partake more of the
movement of the time, admired his work."

His latest and most important work, the Church of
the Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, is a case in point. It has
drawn out the most completely opposed judgments from by
no means incompetent men ; denounced by some, it has
won the warmest praise from others, as, for instance, from
two men who stand in the very front rank of those who

* It is much to be wished that these Lectures and Addresses
should be collected and published.

MEMOIR. xiii

excel, William Morris has said of it, " It is on the whole the
best modern interior of a town church " ; and the eminent
painter, E. Burnes-Jones, writing to John Sedding, writes :
" I cannot tell you how I admire it, and how I longed to
be at it." Speaking further of this sympathy with old work,
Mr. Longden, who knew him intimately, and worked much
with him, writes, " The rather rude character of the Cornish
granite work in the churches did not repel him, indeed, he
said he loved it, because he understood it. He has made
additions to churches in Cornwall, such as it may well be
imagined the old Cornishmen would have done, yet with
an indescribable touch of modernness about them. He also
felt at home with the peculiar character of the Devonshire
work, and some of his last work is in village churches
where he has made a rather ordinary church quite beauti-
ful and interesting, by repairing and extending old wooden
screens, putting in wooden seats, with an endless variety of
symbolic designs, marble font and floor, fine metal work,
simple but well -designed stained glass, good painting in a
reredos, all, as must be with an artist, adding to the general
effect, and falling into place in that general effect, while each
part is found beautiful and interesting, if examined in detail."

" The rich Somersetshire work, where the fine stone
lends itself to elaborate carving, was very sympathetic to
Sedding, and he has added to and repaired many churches
in that county, always taking the fine points in the old
work and bringing them out by his own additions, whether
in the interior or the exterior, seizing upon any peculiarity
of site or position to show the building to the best advan-
tage, and never forgetting the use of a church, but in-
creasing the convenience of the arrangements for worship,
and emphasizing the sacred character of the buildings on
which he worked."

In his lectures to Art students, no plea was more often
on his lips than the plea for living Art, as contrasted with

c

xiv MEMOIR.

" shop " Art, or mere antiquarianism. The artist is the pro-
duct of his own time and of his own country, his nature
comes to him out of the past, and is nourished in part
upon the past, but he lives in the present, and of the
present, sharing its spirit and its culture. John Sedding
had great faith in the existence of this art gift, as living
and active in his own time, he recognised it reverently and
humbly in himself, and looked for it and hailed it with
joy and generous appreciation in others. Hence the value
he set upon association among Art workers. " Les gens
d'esprit," says M. Taine, speaking of Art in Italy, " n'ont
jamais plus d'esprit que lorsqu'ils sont ensemble. Pour
avoir des ceuvres d'art il faut d'abord des artistes, mais
aussi des ateliers. Alors il y avait des ateliers, et en outre
les artistes faisaient des corporations. Tous se tenaient,
et dans la grande societe, de petites socie'te's unissaient
etroitement et librement leurs membres, La familiarite les
rapprochait ; la rivalite les aiguillonnait."*

He gave practical effect to these views in the conduct
of his own office, which was as totally unlike the regulation
architect's office, as life is unlike clockwork.

Here is a charming "interior" from the pen of his able
chief assistant and present successor, Mr. H. Wilson : —

" I shall not readily forget my first impressions of Mr.
Sedding. I was introduced to him at one of those delightful
meetings of the Art Workers' Guild, and his kindly recep-
tion of me, his outstretched hand, and the unconscious
backward impulses of his head, displaying the peculiar
whiteness of the skin over the prominent temporal and
frontal bones, the playful gleam of his eyes as he welcomed
me, are things that will remain with me as long as memory
lasts.

" Soon after that meeting I entered his office, only to

* Philosophic de I' art en Italic (p. 162).— H. TAINE.

MEMOIR. xv

find that he was just as delightful at work as in the
world.

"The peculiar half shy yet eager way in which he rushed
into the front room, with a smile and a nod of recognition
for each of us, always struck me. But until he got to work
he always seemed preoccupied, as if while apparently
engaged in earnest discussion of some matter an under-
current of thought was running the while, and as if he were
devising something wherewith to beautify his work even
when arranging business affairs.

" This certainly must have been the case, for frequently
he broke off in the midst of his talk to turn to a board and
sketch out some design, or to alter a detail he had sketched
the day before with a few vigorous pencil-strokes. This
done, he would return to business, only to glance off again
to some other drawing, and to complete what would not
come the day before. In fact he was exactly like a bird
hopping from twig to twig, and from flower to flower, as he
hovered over the many drawings which were his daily
work, settling here a form and there a moulding as the
impulse of the moment seized him.

" And though at times we were puzzled to account for, or
to anticipate his ways, and though the work was often
hindered by them, we would not have had it otherwise.

" Those * gentillesses d'oiseaux,' as Hugo says, those
little birdy ways, so charming from their unexpectedness,
kept us constantly on the alert, for we never quite knew
what he would do next. It was not his custom to move in
beaten tracks, and his everyday life was as much out of the
common as his inner life. His ways with each of us were
marked by an almost womanly tenderness. He seemed to
regard us as his children, and to have a parent's intuition
of our troubles, and of the special needs of each with
reference to artistic development.

" He would come, and taking possession of our stools

c 2

xvi MEMOIR.

would draw with his left arm round us, chatting cheerily,
and yet erasing, designing vigorously meanwhile. Then,
with his head on one side like a jackdaw earnestly re-
garding something which did not quite please him, he
would look at the drawing a moment, and pounce on the
paper, rub all his work out, and begin again. His criti-
cism of his own work was singularly frank and outspoken
even to us. I remember once when there had been a
slight disagreement between us, I wrote to him to ex-
plain. Next morning, when he entered the office, he came
straight to the desk where I was working, quietly put his
arm round me, took my free hand with his and pressed it
and myself to him without a word. It was more than enough.

He was, however, not one of those who treat all alike.
He adapted himself with singular facility to each one with
whom he came in contact ; his insight in this respect was
very remarkable, and in consequence he was loved and ad-
mired by the most diverse natures. The expression of his
face was at all times pleasant but strangely varied, like a
lake it revealed every passing breath of emotion in the
most wonderful way, easily ruffled and easily calmed.

" His eyes were very bright and expressive, with long
lashes, the upper lids large, full, and almost translucent,
and his whole face at anything which pleased him lit up
and became truly radiant. At such times his animation
in voice, gesture, and look was quite remarkable, his talk
was full of felicitous phrases, happy hits, and piquant
sayings.

" His was the most childlike nature I have yet seen,
taking pleasure in the simplest things, ever ready for fun,
trustful, impulsive, and joyous, yet easily cast down. His
memory for details and things he had seen and sketched
was marvellous, and he could turn to any one of his many
sketches and find a tiny scribble made twenty or thirty
years ago, as easily as if he had made it yesterday.

MEMOIR. xvii

" His favourite attitude in the office was with his back to
the fireplace and with his hands behind him, head thrown
back, looking at, or rather through one. He seldom seemed
to look at anyone or anything, his glance always had
something of divination in it, and in his sketches, how-
ever slight, the soul of the thing was always seized, and
the accidental or unnecessary details left to others less
gifted to concern themselves with.

" His love of symbolism was only equalled by his genius
for it, old ideas had new meanings for him, old symbols
were invested with deeper significance and new ones full
of grace and beauty discovered. In this his intense, en-
thusiastic love of nature and natural things stood him in
good stead, and he used Nature as the old men did, to
teach new truths. For him as well as for all true artists,
the universe was the living visible garment of God, the thin
glittering rainbow-coloured veil which hides the actual from
our eyes. He was the living embodiment of all that an
architect should be, he had the sacred fire of enthusiasm
within, and he had the power of communicating that fire
to others, so that workmen, masons, carvers could do, and
did lovingly for him, what they would not or could not
do for others. We all felt and still feel that it was his
example and precept that has given us what little true
knowledge and right "feeling for Art we may possess, and
the pity is there will never be his like again.

" He was not one of those who needed to pray 'Lord,
keep my memory green,' though that phrase was often on
his lips, as well as another delightful old epitaph :

' Bonys emonge stonys lys ful steyl
Quilst the soules wanderis where that God will.' "*

This delightful and assuredly entirely faithful picture

In Thornhill Church.

'xviii MEMOIR.

is in itself evidence of the contagion of John Bedding's
enthusiasm.

Beyond the inner circle of his own office, he sought and
welcomed the unfettered co-operation of other artists in his
work ; in the words of a young sculptor, " he gave us a
chance." He let them say their say instead of binding
them to repeat his own. God had His message to deliver
by them, and he made way that the world might hear it
straight from their lips.

The same idea of sympathetic association, " fraternit£
genereuse — confiance mutuelle — communaute de sym-
pathies et d'aspirations," has found embodiment in the
Art Workers' Guild, a society in which artists and
craftsmen of all the Arts meet and associate on common
ground. John Sedding was one of the original members of
this Guild, and its second Master.

Of his connection with the Guild the Secretary writes :
" No member was ever more respected, none had more
influence, no truer artist existed in the Guild." And Mr.
Walter Crane: "His untiring devotion to the Guild through-
out his term of office, and his tact and temper, were beyond
praise."

It must not be inferred from these facts that John
Sedding's sympathies were only for the world of Art, art-
workers, and art-ideals. He shared to the full the ardour
of his Socialist friends, in their aspirations for that new
order of more just distribution of all that makes for the
happiness of men, the coming "city which hath foundations
whose builder and maker is God." He did not share their
confidence in their methods, but he honoured their noble
humanity, and followed their movements with interest and
respect, giving what help he could. The condition of the
poor, especially the London poor, touched him to the quick
sometimes with indignation at their wrongs, sometimes
with deep compassion and humbled admiration at the

MEMOIR.

pathetic patience with which they bore the burden of
their joyless, suffering lives. His own happy constitution
and experience never led him to adopt the cheap optimism
with which so many of us cheat our conscience, and justify
to ourselves our own selfish inertness. The more ample
income of his last years made no difference in the simple
ordering of his household, it did make difference in his
charities. He gave money, and what is better, gave his
personal labour to many works for the good of others,
some of which he himself had inaugurated.

John Sedding was an artist by a necessity of his nature.
God made him so, and he could not but exercise his gift,
but apart from the satisfaction that comes by doing what
we are meant for, it filled him with thankfulness to have
been born to a craft with ends so noble as are the ends of
Art. To give pleasure and to educate are aims good indeed
to be bound by, especially when by education we under-
stand, not mind-stuffing, but mind-training, in this case the
training of faculty to discern and be moved by the poetry,
the spiritual suggestiveness of common everyday life.
This brought his calling into touch with working folk.

As a man, John Sedding impressed us all by the singular
and beautiful simplicity and childlikeness of his character,
a childlikeness which never varied, and nothing, not even
the popularity and homage which at last surrounded him,
seemed able to spoil it. He never lost his boyish spon-
taneity and frankness, the unrestrained brightness of his
manners and address, his boyish love of fun, and hearty,
ringing laugh. Mr. Walter Crane speaks of his " indomit-
able gaiety and spirits which kept all going, especially in
our country outings." " He always led the fun," writes
Mr. Lethaby, u at one time at the head of a side at ' tug
of war/ at another, the winner in an 'egg and spoon
race.' " His very faults were the faults of childhood, the
impulsiveness, the quick and unreflecting resentment

MEMOIR.

against wrong, and the vehement denunciation of it. He
trusted his instincts far more than his reason, and on the
whole, his instincts served him right well, yet at times they
failed him, as in truth they fail us all. There were
occasions when a little reflection would have led him to see
that his first rapid impressions were at fault, and so have
spared himself and others some pain and misunderstanding.
Let a thing appear to him false, unfair, or cowardly, he
would lower his lance and dash full tilt at it at once, some-
times to our admiration, sometimes to our amusement
when the appearance proved but a windmill in the mist,
sometimes to our dismay when — a rare case — he mistook
friend for foe.

No picture of John Sedding could be considered at
all to represent him which failed to express the blame-
le*ss purity of his character and conduct. I do not
think the man lives who ever heard a tainted word from
his lips. There was in him such depth and strength of
moral wholesomeness that he sickened at, and revolted
against the unseemly jest, and still more against the scenes,
and experiences of the sensuous (to use no stronger word)
upon which in the minds of some, the artist must perforce
feed his gift. With his whole soul he repudiated the idea
that Art grew only as a flower upon the grave of virtue,
and that artists could, or desired to, lay claim to larger
moral licence than other less imaginative men.

I have kept till last the best and deepest that was in
him, the hidden root of all he was, the hallowing of all he
did. I mean his piety — his deep, unfeigned piety. In his
address at the annual meeting of the Confraternity of the
Blessed Sacrament, a singularly outspoken and vigorous
exhortation to laymen to keep their practice abreast of
their faith, he used the following words : " In the wild
scene of iQth century work, and thought, and passion, when
old snares still have their old witchery, and new depths of

MEMOIR. xxi

wickedness yawn at our feet, when the world is so
wondrous kind to tired souls, and neuralgic bodies, and
itself pleads for concessions to acknowledged weakness ;
when unfaith is so like faith, and the devil freely suffers
easy acquiescence in high gospel truth, and even holds a
magnifying-glass that one may better see the sweetness of
the life of the * Son of Man,' it is well in these days of
sloth, and sin, and doubt, to have one's energies braced by
a ' girdle of God ' about one's loins ! It is well, I say, for
a man to have a circle of religious exercises that can so
hedge him about, so get behind his life, and wind them-
selves by long familiarity into his character that they be-
come part of his everyday existence — bone of his bone."

Out of his own real knowledge and practice he spoke
these words. The " circle of religious exercise," the girdle
of God, had become for him part of his everyday existence.
I can think of no better words to express the unwavering
consistency of his life. It is no part of my duty to tell in
detail what and how much he did, and with what whole-
heartedness he did it.

Turning to outward things, every associate of John
Sedding knew his enthusiasm for the cause of the Catholic
revival in the English Church. It supplied him with a
religion for his whole nature. No trouble seemed too
great on behalf of it," though often his zeal entailed upon
him some material disadvantage. Again and again I have
known him give up precious hours and even days in unre-
munerated work, to help some struggling church or mission,
or some poor religious community. It was a joy to him to
contribute anything to the beauty of the sanctuary or the
solemnity of its offices. From the year 1878 to 1881 he
was sidesman, from 1882 to 1889 churchwarden of St.
Alban's, Holborn, doing his work thoroughly, and with
conspicuous kindliness and courtesy. It was one of the
thorns to the rose of his new life in the country that it

MEMOIR.

obliged him to discontinue this office. For eleven years he
played the organ on Sunday afternoons for a service for
young men and maidens, few of whom can forget the
extraordinary life and pathos that he was wont by some
magic to put into his accompaniment to their singing.

This present year, 1891, opened full of promise for
John Sedding. In a marvellously short time he had come
hand over hand into public notice and public esteem, as a
man from whom excellent things were to be expected, —
things interesting, original, and beautiful. Mr. Burne Jones
writes: "My information about Sedding's work is very
slight, — my interest in him very great, and my admiration
too, from the little I had seen. I know only the church in
Sloane Street, but that was enough to fill me with the
greatest hope about him . , . I saw him in all some
half-dozen times — liked him instantly, and felt I knew
him intimately, and was looking forward to perhaps years
of collaboration with him."

Work brought work, as each thing he did revealed, to
those who had eyes to see, the gift that was in him. At
Art Congresses and all assemblies of Art Workers his
co-operation was sought and his presence looked for,
especially by the younger men, who hailed him and his
words with enthusiasm. To these gatherings he brought
something more and better than the sententious wisdom,
the chill repression which many feel called upon to ad-
minister on the ground of their experience. Experience—
" cette pauvre petite cabane construite avec les debris cle
ces palais d'or, et de marbre appeles nos illusions." He
put something of the fire that was in him into the hearts
that heard him, he made them proud of their cause and of
their place in it, and hopeful for its triumph and their own
success. It was a contribution of sunshine and fresh air,
and all that is the complete opposite of routine, red-tape,
and the conventional.

MEMOIR. xxiii

We who have watched his progress have noticed of late
a considerable development in his literary power, a more
marked individuality of style, a swifter and smoother
movement, a richer vocabulary, and new skill in the presen-
tation of his ideas. He was exceedingly happy in his
illustrations of a principle, and his figures were always
interesting, never hackneyed. A certain " bonhomie " in
his way of putting things won willing hearers for his
words, which seemed to come to meet us with a smile
and open, outstretched hands, as the dear speaker himself
was wont to do. Something of course of the living
qualities of speech are lost when we can receive it only
from the cold black and white of print, instead of winged
and full of human music from the man's own lips. Yet,
in spite of this, unless I am mistaken, readers of this book
will not fail to find in it a good deal to justify my judgment.

It seems to have taken some of his friends by surprise
that John Sedding should write on Gardens. They knew
him the master of many crafts, but did not count Garden-
craft among them. As a matter of fact, it was a love that
appeared late in life, though all along it must have been
within the man, for the instant he had a garden of his
own the passion appeared full grown. Every evening
between five and six, save when his work called him to
distant parts, you might have seen him step quickly out
of the train at the little station of West Wickham, run
across the bridge, and greeting and greeted by everybody,
swing along the shady road leading to his house. In his
house, first he kissed his wife and children, and then sup-
posing there was light and the weather fine, his coat was
off and he fell to work at once with spade or trowel in his
garden, absorbed in his plants and flowers, and the plea-
sant crowding thoughts that plants and flowers bring.

After supper he assembled his household to say even-
ing prayers with them. When all had gone to rest he
would settle himself in his little study and write, write,

MEMOIR.

write, until past midnight, sometimes past one, dash-
ing now and again at a book upon his shelves to verify
some one or other of those quaint and telling bits which
are so happily inwoven into his text. One fruit of these
labours is this book on Garden-craft.

But I have detained the reader long enough. All is by
no means told, and many friends will miss, I doubt not,
with disappointment this or that feature which they knew
and loved in him. It cannot be helped. I have written
as I could, not as I would, within the narrow limits which
rightly bound a preface.

How the end came, how within fourteen days the hand
of God took from our midst the much love, genius, beaut}-
which His hand had given us in the person of John and
Rose Sedding, a few words only must tell.

On Easter Monday, March 3Oth, John Sedding
spent two hours in London, giving the last sitting
for the bust which was being modelled at the
desire of the Art Workers' Guild. The rest of the
day he was busy in his garden. Next morning he left
early for Winsford, in Somersetshire, to look after the
restoration of this and some other churches in the neigh-
bourhood. Winsford village is ten miles from the nearest
railway station Dulverton ; the road follows the beauti-
ful valley of the Exe, which rising in the moors, de-
scends noisily and rapidly southwards to the sea. The
air is strangely chill in the hollow of this woody valley.
Further, it was March, and March of this memorable year
of 1891. Lines of snow still lay in the ditches, and in
white patches on the northern side of hedgerows. Within
a fortnight of this time men and cattle had perished in the
snow-drifts on the higher ground.

Was this valley the valley of death for our friend, or
were the seeds of death already within him ? I know not.
Next morning, Wednesday, he did not feel well enough to
get up. His kind hostess, and host, the Vicar of the parish,

MEMOIR. xxv

did all that kindness — kindness made harder and there-
fore more kind by ten miles' distance from a railway
station — could do. John sent for his wife, who came at
once, with her baby in her arms. On Saturday at mid-
night -he received his last Communion. The next day
he seemed to brighten and gave us hopes. On Monday
there was a change for the worse, and on Tuesday morning
he passed away in perfect peace.

At the wish of his wife, his grave was prepared at West
Wickham. The Solemn Requiem, by her wish also, was
at the church he loved and served so well, St. Alban's,
Holborn. That church has witnessed many striking
scenes, but few more impressive than the great gather-
ing at his funeral. The lovely children's pall that John
Sedding had himself designed and Rose Sedding had em-
broidered, covered the coffin, and on the right of it in a
dark mass were gathered his comrades of the Art Workers'
Guild.

The tragedy does not end here. On that day week, at
that very same hour and spot, beneath the same pall, lay
the body of his dear and devoted wife.

Side by side, near the tall elms of the quiet Kentish
churchyard, the bodies of John and Rose Sedding are
sleeping. The spot was in a sense chosen by Rose
Sedding, if we may-use the term ' choice ' for her simple
wish that it might be where the sun shines and flowers will
grow. The western slope of the little hill was fixed upon,
and already the flowers they loved so well are blooming
over them.

Among the papers of Rose Sedding was found, pencilled
in her own handwriting, the following lines of a I7th
century poet :

" 'Tis fit one flesh one house should have,
One tomb, one epitaph, one grave ;,
And they that lived and loved either
Should dye, and lye, and sleep together."

xxvi MEMOIR.

How strange that the words should have found in her
own case such exact fulfilment.

E. F. RUSSELL.

St. Alban's Clergy House,

Brooke Street, Holborn.
June, 1891.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Theory of a Garden ... i
II. Art in a Garden ...

III. Historical and Comparative Sketch ... 41

IV. The Stiff Garden ... ... 7°

V. The " Landscape-Garden " ... ... 98

VI. The Technics of Gardening ... 133

VII. The Technics of Gardening (continued) 153

ON THE OTHER SIDE.

VIII. A Plea for Savagery ... ... 183

IX. In Praise of Both ... 202

•LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Levens. View in Garden ... ... ... ... Frontispiece

Levens. „ „ „ ... ... ... ... to face p. 2 2

No. 8.— A Garden Enclosed „ 48

View of the Fountains of the Cordonata ... ... ,, 64

No. i. — Plan of Rosary with Sundial „ 156

Perspective View of Garden in Plan No. i ... ,,156

No. 7.- -Plan of Tennis Lawn, Terraces, and Flower

Garden ... . „ 158

NO> 5. — General Plan of the Great Hall of the

Villa Borghese „ 160

No. 3. — General Plan of the Pleasaunce, Villa

Albani „ 160

No. 4. — Plan showing Arrangement of Sunk Flower

Garden „ 164

No. 2. — Plan of Sunk Flower Garden. — Perspec-
tive View ... ... ... ... ... „ 1 66

Perspective View of Sunk Garden in Plan No. 2 ,, 166

Perspective View of Part of Garden at Downes,

Hayle ... „ 17°

Perspective View of Garden in Plan No. 6 ... „ 1 80

No. 6. — Plan showing Arrangement for Fountain,

Yew Walk, &c. „ 180

Perspective View of a Design for a Garden, with

Clipped Yew Hedges, &c „ 182

GARDEN-CRAFT.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN.

" Come hither, come hither, come hither ;
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather."

SOME subjects require to be delineated according to
their own taste. Whatever the author's notions
about it at starting, the subject somehow slips out
of his grasp and dictates its own method of treat-
ment and style. The subject of gardening answers
to this description : you cannot treat it in a regula-
tion manner. It is a discursive subject that of itself
breeds laggard humours, inclines you to reverie, and
suggests a discursive style.

This much in defence of my desultory essay.
The subject, in a manner, drafts itself. Like the
garden, it, too, has many aspects, many side-paths,
that open out broken vistas to detach one's interest
and lure from the straight, broad terrace-platform of
orderly discourse. At first sight, perhaps, with the
balanced beauty of the thing in front of you, care-
fully parcelled out and enclosed, as all proper

GARDEN-CRAFT.

gardens are, the theme may appear so compact,
that all meandering after side-issues may seem sheer
wantonness. As you proceed, however, it becomes
apparent that you may not treat of a garden and
disregard the instincts it prompts, the connection it
has with Nature, its place in Art, its office in the
world as a sweetener of human life. True, the
garden itself is hedged in and neatly defined, but
behind the garden is the man who made it ; behind
the man is the house he has built, which the garden
adorns ; and every man has his humours ; every
house has its own conditions of plan and site ; every
garden has its own atmosphere, its own contents, its
own story.

So now, having in this short preamble discovered
something of the rich variety and many-sidedness of
the subject, I proceed to write down three questions
just to try what the yoke of classification may do
to keep one's feet within bounds : (i) What is a
garden, and why is it made ? (2) What ornamental
treatment is fit and right for a garden ? (3) What
should be the relation of the garden to the house ?

Forgive me if, in dealing with the first point, I
so soon succumb to the allurements of my theme,
and drop into flowers of speech ! To me, then, a
garden is the outward and visible sign of man's
innate love of loveliness. It reveals man on his
artistic side. Beauty, it would seem, has a magnetic
charm for him ; and the ornamental display of
flowers betokens his bent for, and instinctive
homage of beauty. And to say this of man in one

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN.

grade of life is to say it of all sorts and conditions
of men ; and to say it of one garden is to say it of
all — whether the garden be the child of quality or of
lowliness ; whether it adorn castle, manor-house,
villa, road-side cottage or signalman's box at the
railway siding, or Japanese or British tea-garden, or
Babylonian terrace or Platonic grove at Athens — in
each case it was made for eye-delight at Beauty's
bidding. Even the Puritan, for all his gloomy creed
and bleak undecorated life, is Romanticist here ;
the hater of outward show turns rank courtier at a
pageant of flowers : he will dare the devil at any
moment, but not life without flowers. And so we
have him lovingly bending over the plants of his
home-garden, packing the seeds to carry with him
into exile, as though these could make expatriation
tolerable. " There is not a softer trait to be found
in the character of these stern men than that they
should have been sensible of their flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and
have felt the necessity of bringing them over sea and
making them hereditary in the new land." (Haw-
thorne, ''Our Old Home," p. 77.)

But to take a higher point of view. A garden is,
in many ways, the "mute gospel" it has been declared
to be. It is the memorial of Paradise lost, the
pledge of Paradise regained. It is so much of earth's
surface redeemed from the scar of the fall :

" Who loves a garden still keeps his Eden."

Its territories stand, so to speak, betwixt heaven

B 2

GARDEN-CRAFT.

and earth, so that it shares the cross-lights of each.
It parades the joys of earth, yet no less hints the
joys of heaven. It tells of man's happy tillage of
his plot of ground, yet blazes abroad the infinite
abundance of God's wide husbandry of the world.
It bespeaks the glory of earth's array, yet publishes
its passingness.*

Again. The punctual waking of the flowers to
new life upon the ruin of the old is unfavourable to
the fashionable theory of extinction, for it shows
death as the prelude of life. Nevertheless, be it
admitted, the garden-allegory points not all one way ;
it is, so to speak, a paradox that mocks while it
comforts. For a garden is ever perplexing us with
the "riddle of the painful earth," ever challenging
our faith with its counter-proof, ever thrusting
before our eyes the abortive effort, the inequality of
lot (two roses on a single stem, the one full-blown,
a floral paragon, the other dwarfed and withered), the
permitted spite of destiny which favours the fittest
and drives the weak to the wall — ever preaching, with
damnable iteration, the folly of resisting the ills
that warp life and blight fair promise.

And yet while this is so, the annual spectacle
of spring's fresh repair — the awakening from winter's

* Think of "a paradise not like this of ours with so much pains and
curiosity made with hands " — says Evelyn, in the middle of a rhap-
sody on flowers — " eternal in the heavens, where all the trees are
trees of life, the flowers all amaranths ; all the plants perennial,
ever verdant, ever pregnant, and where those who desire knowledge
may taste freely of the fruit of that tree which cost the first gardener
and posterity so dear." (Sylva, " Of Forest-trees," p. 148.)

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 5

trance — the new life that grows in the womb of the
tomb — is happy augury to the soul that passes away,
immature and but half-expressed, of lusty days and
consummate powers in the everlasting garden of
God. It is this very garden's message, " the best is
yet to be," that smothers the self-pitying whine in
poor David Gray's Elegy * and braces his spirit with
the tonic of a wholesome pride. To the human
flower that is born to blush unseen, or born, per-
chance, not to bloom at all, but only to feel the
quickening thrill of April-passion — the first sweet
consciousness of life — the electric touch in the soul
like the faint beatings in the calyx of the rose — and
then to die, to die " not knowing what it was to
live " —to such seemingly cancelled souls the gar-
den's message is " trust, acquiesce, be passive in the
Master's hand : the game of life is lost, but not for
aye—

' • • " There is life with God
In other Kingdom of a sweeter air :
In Eden every flower is blown."

To come back to lower ground, a garden re-
presents what one 'may call the first simplicity of.

' " My Epitaph."

" Below lies one whose name was traced in sand —
He died, not knowing what it was to live ;
Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul :
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader, pass without a sigh
In a proud sorrow ! There is life with God,
In other Kingdom of a sweeter air ;
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen."
DAVID GRAY ("A Poet's Sketch-book, R. Buchanan, p. 8 1.)

GARDEN-CRAFT.

external Nature's ways and means, and the first
simplicity of man's handling of them, carried to dis-
tinction. On one side we have Nature's "unpre-
meditated art " surpassed upon its own lines —
Nature's tardy efforts and common elementary traits
pushed to a masterpiece. On the other side is the
callow craft of Adam's "'prentice han'," turned into
scrupulous nice-fingered Art, with forcing-pits, glass-
houses, patent manures, scientific propagation, and
the accredited rules and hoarded maxims of a host of
horticultural journals at its back.

Or, to run still more upon fancy. A garden is a
place where these two whilom foes — Nature and
man — patch up a peace for the nonce. Outside
the garden precincts — in the furrowed field, in the
forest, the quarry, the mine, out upon the broad
seas — the feud still prevails that began as our first
parents found themselves on the wrong side of the
gate of Paradise. But

" Here contest grows but interchange of love "-

here the old foes have struck a truce and are leagued
together in a kind of idyllic intimacy, as is witnessed
in their exchange of grace for grace, and the crown-
ing touch that each puts upon the other's efforts.

The garden, I have said, is a sort of " be-
tween ity " — part heaven, part earth, in its sugges-
tions ; so, too, in its make-up is it part Nature,
part man : for neither can strictly say " I made the
garden " to disregard the other's share in it. True,
that behind all the contents of the place sits primal

ON THE, THEORY OF A GARDEN.

Nature, but Nature " to advantage dressed," Nature
in a rich disguise, Nature delicately humoured,
stamped with new qualities, furnished with a new
momentum, led to new conclusions, by man's skill in
selection and artistic concentration, True, that the
contents of the place have their originals somewhere
in the wild — in forest or coppice, or meadow, or
hedgerow, swamp, jungle, Alp, or plain hill-side.
We can run each thing to earth any day, only that a
change has passed over them ; what in its original
state was complex or general, is here made a chosen
particular ; what was monotonous out there, is here
mixed and contrasted ; what was rank and ragged
there, is here taught to be staid and fine ; what had
a fugitive beauty there, has here its beauty prolonged,
and is combined with other items, made " of imagi-
nation all compact." Man has taken the several
things and transformed them ; and in th process
they passed, as it were, through the crucible of his
mind to reappear in daintier guise ; in the process,
the face of Nature became, so to speak, humanised :
man's artistry conyeyed an added charm.

Judged thus, a garden is, at one and the same
time, the response which Nature makes to man's
overtures, and man's answer to the standing challenge
of open-air beauty everywhere. Here they work no
longer in a spirit of rivalry, but for the attainment of
a common end. We cannot dissociate them in the
garden. A garden is man's transcript of the wood-
land world : it is common vegetation ennobled :
outdoor scenery neatly writ in man's small hand.

GARDEN-CRAFT.

It is a sort of twin-picture, conceived of man in the
studio of his brain, painted upon Nature's canvas
with the aid of her materials — a twin-essay where
Nature's

" primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind "

supplies the matter, man the style. It is Nature's
rustic language made fluent and intelligible — Nature's
garrulous prose tersely recast — changed into imagin-
ative shapes, touched to finer issues.

" What is a garden ? " For answer come hither :
be Fancy's guest a moment. Turn in from the dusty
high-road and noise of practical things — for

" Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love " ;

descend the octagonal steps ; cross the green court,
bright with great urns of flowers, that fronts the house;
pass under the arched doorway in the high enclosing
wall, with its gates traceried with rival wreaths of
beaten iron and clambering sprays of jasmine and
rose, and, from the vantage-ground of the terrace-
platform where we stand, behold an art-enchanted
world, where the alleys with their giddy cunning, their
gentle gloom, their cross-lights and dappled shadows
of waving boughs, make paths of fantasy — where
the water in the lake quivers to the wind's soft foot-
prints, or sparkles where the swallows dip, or springs
in jets out of shapely fountain, or, oozing from
bronze dolphin's mouth, slides down among moss-
flecked stones into a deep dark pool, and is seen anon
threading with still foot the careless-careful curved

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN.

banks fringed with flowering shrubs and trailing
willows and brambles — where the flowers smile out
of dainty beds in the sunny ecstasy of " sweet mad-
ness " — where the air is flooded with fragrance, and
the mixed music of trembling leaves, falling water,
singing birds, and the drowsy hum of innumerable
insects' wings.

" What is a garden ? " It is man's report of earth
at her best. It is earth emancipated from the com-
monplace. Earth is man's intimate possession —
Earth arrayed for beauty's bridal. It is man's love
of loveliness carried to excess — man's craving for the
ideal grown to a fine lunacy. It is piquant wonder-
ment ; culminated beauty, that for all its combination
of telling and select items, can still contrive to look
natural, debonair, native to its place. A garden is
Nature aglow, illuminated with new significance. It
is Nature on parade before men's eyes; Flodden Field
in every parish, where on summer days she holds
court in " lanes of splendour," beset with pomp and
pageantry more glorious than all the kings'.

" Why is a garden made ? " Primarily, it would
seem, to gratify man's craving for beauty. Behind
fine gardening is fine desire. It is a plain fact that
men do not make beautiful things merely for the sake
of something to do, but, rather, because their souls
compel them. Any beautiful work of art is a feat,
an assay, of human soul. Someone has said that
" noble dreams are great realities " — this in praise
of unrealised dreams ; but here, in the fine garden,
is the noble dream and the great reality.

io GARDEN-CRAFT.

Here it may be objected that the ordinary garden
is, after all, only a compromise between the common
and the ideal : half may be for the lust of the eye,
yet half is for domestic drudgery ; half is for beauty,
half for use. The garden is contrived " a double
debt to pay." Yonder mass of foliage that bounds
the garden, with its winding intervals of turf and
look of expansiveness, it serves to conceal villadom
and the hulking paper-factory beyond ; that rock-
garden with its developed geological formation, dot-
ted over with choice Alpine plants, that the stranger
comes to see. It is nothing but the quarry from
whence the stone was dug that built the house. Those
banks of evergreens, full of choice specimens, what
are they but on one side the screen to your kitchen
stuff, and on the other side, the former tenant's con-
trivance to assist him in forgetting his neighbour ?
Even so, my friend, an it please you ! You are of
those who, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, would sever a
bee in two, if you could !

The garden, you say, is a compromise between
the common and the ideal. Yet nobility comes in
low disguises. We have seen that the garden is
wild nature elevated and transformed by man's skill
in selection and artistic concentration — wild things to
which man's art has given dignity. The common
flowers of the cottager's garden tell of centuries of
collaboration. The flowers and shrubs and trees
with which you have adorned your own grounds
were won for you by the curiosity, the aspiration,
the patient roaming and ceaseless research of a long

OiV THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 11

list of old naturalists ; the design of your garden,
its picturesque divisions and beds, a result of
the social sense, the faculty for refined enjoyment,
the constructive genius of the picked minds of the
civilised world in all ages. The methods of planting
approved of to-day, carrying us back to the admir-
ably-dressed grounds of the ancient castles and
abbeys, to the love of woodland scenery, which is
said to be a special characteristic of Teutonic people,
which is evidenced in the early English ballads ; to
the slowly acquired traditions of garden-masters like
Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Gilpin, and Repton, as well
as to the idealised landscapes of Constable, Gains-
borough, Linnell, and Turner; it is, in fact, the
issue of the practical insight, the wood-craft, and
idealistic skill of untold generations.

In this matter of floral beauty and garden-craft
man has ever declared himself a prey to the
"malady of the ideal " ; the Japanese will even combine
upon his trees the tints of spring and autumn.*
But everywhere, and in all ages of the civilised
world, man spares no pains to acquire the choicest
specimens, the rarest plants, and to give to each thing
so acquired the ideally best expression of which
it is capable. It is as though Eden-memories still

* " This strange combination of autumn and spring tints is a very
usual sight in Japan. . . . It is worth noting that in Japan a tree
is considered chiefly for its form and tint, not for use. . . I heard
the cherry-trees were now budding, so I hurried up to take advantage
of them, and found them more beautiful than I had ever imagined.
There are at least fifty varieties, from delicately tinted white and pink
to the richest rose, almost crimson blossom." — Alfred East's " Trip to
Japan," Universal Review, March, 1890.

12 GARDEN-CRAFT.

haunted the race with the solicitude of an inward
voice that refused to be silenced, and is satisfied
with nothing short of the best.

And yet, as some may point out, this homage of
beauty that you speak of is not done for nought ;
there enters into gardening the spirit of calculation.
A garden is a kind of investment. The labour and
forethought man expends upon it must bring
adequate return. For every flower-bed he lays
down, for every plant, or shrub, .or tree put into the
ground, his word is ever the same,

" Be its beauty
Its sole duty."

It was not simply to gratify his curiosit}^ to serve as
a pretext for adventure, that the gardener of old days
reconnoitred the globe, culled specimens, and spent
laborious days in studying earth's picturesque points ;
it was with a view to the pleasure the things would
ultimately bring. And why not ! Had man not
served so long an apprenticeship to Nature on her
freehold estate, the garden would not so directly
appeal to our imaginations and command our spirits.
A garden reveals man as master of Nature's lore ; he
has caught her accents, rifled her motives ; he has
transferred her bright moods about his own dwelling,
has tricked out an ordered mosaic of the gleanings
of her woodland carpet ; has, as it were, stereotyped the
spontaneous in Nature, has entrapped and rendered
beautifully objective the natural magic of the outer
world to gratify the inner world of his own spirit.

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 13

The garden is, first and last, made " for delectation's
sake."

So we arrive at these conclusions. A garden is
made to express man's delight in beauty and to
gratify his instincts for idealisation. But, lest the
explanation savour too much of self-interest in the
gardener, it may be well to say that the interest of
man's investment of money and toil is not all for
himself. What he captures of Nature's revenues he-
repays with usury, in coin that bears the mint-mark
of inspired invention. This artistic handling o
natural things has for result " the world's fresh orna-
ment,"* and for plant, shrub, or tree subject to it, it
is the crowning and completion of those hidden pos-

* "If you look into our gardens annexed to our houses" (says
William Harrison in Holinshed's "Chronicles") " how wonderful is
their beauty increased, not only with flowers, which Columella calleth
Terrena Sydera, saying ' Pingit et in varias terrestria, sydera flores,'
and variety of curious and costly workmanship, but also with rare and
medicinable herbs. . . . How Art also helpeth Nature in the daily
colouring, doubling and enlarging the proportions of our flowers it is
incredible to report, for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now
in these days that they presume to do, in a manner, what they list
with Nature, and moderate her course in things as if they were her
superiors. It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants,
and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Ameri-
cans, Taprobane, Canary Isles, and all parts of the world, the which,
albeit that his respect of the constitutions of our bodies, they do not
grow for us (because God hath bestowed sufficient commodities upon
every country for her own necessity) yet for delectation's sake unto the
eye, and their odoriferous savours unto the nose, they are to be
cherished, and God also glorified in them, because they are His good
gifts, and created to do man help and service. There is not almost
one nobleman, gentleman, or merchant that hath not great store of
these flowers, which now also begin to wax so well acquainted with
our evils that we may almost account of them as parcel of our own
commodities.'" — (From " Elizabethan England," p. 26-7.)

I4 GARDEN-CRAFT,

sibilities of perfection that have lain dormant in them
since the world began.

An artist has been defined as one who reproduces
the world in his own image and likeness. The defi-
nition is perhaps a little high-flown, and may confer
an autobiographical value to an artist's performances
that would astonish none more than himself. Yet
if the thought can be truthfully applied anywhere,
it is where it occurred to Andrew Marvell — in a
garden.

" The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."

And where can we find a more promising sphere
for artistic creation than a garden ? Do we boast of
fine ideas and perceptions of beauty and powers of
design ! Where can our faculties find a happier
medium of expression or a pleasanter field for dis-
play than the garden affords ? Nay, to have the
ideas, the faculties, and the chance of their exercise
and still to hold back were a sin ! For a garden is,
so to speak, the compliment a man of ideas owes to
Nature, to his friends, and to himself.

Many are the inducements to gardening. Thus,
if I make a garden, I need not print a line, nor
conjure with the painter's tools, to prove myself an
artist. Again, a garden is the only form of artistic
creation that is bound by the nature of things to be
more lovely in realisation than in the designer's con-

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 15

ception. It is no mere hint of beauty — no mere
tickling of the fancy — that we get here, such as all
other arts (except music) are apt to give you. Here,
on the contrary, we are led straight into a world of
actual delights patent to all men, which our eyes
can see, and our hands handle. More than this ;
whilst in other spheres of labour the greater part of
our life's toil and moil will, of a surety, end as the
wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit,
here is instant physical refreshment in the work the
garden entails, and, in the end, our labour will be
crowned with flowers.

Nor have I yet exhausted the scene of a garden's
pleasures. A man gets undoubted satisfaction in the
very expression of his ideas — " the joy of the deed "
— in the sense of Nature's happy response, the delight
of creation,* the romance of possibility.

Some joy shall also come of the identity of the
gardener with his creation. f He is at home here.
He is intimate with the various growths. He carries
in his head an infinity of details touching the welfare
of the garden's contejits. He participates in the life

* Here is Emerson writing to Carlyle of his "new plaything" — a
piece of woodland of forty acres on the border of Walden Pond. "In
these May mornings, when maples, poplars, walnut, and pine are in
their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon and cut with my
hatchet an Indian path thro' the thicket, all along the bold shore,
and open the finest pictures." (John Morley's Essays, " Emerson,"
p. 304.) But, as Mr. Morley points out, he finds the work too fasci-
nating, eating up days and weeks ; " nay, a brave scholar should shun
it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these per-
nicious enchantments."

t " I like your Essays," said Henry the Third to Montaigne.
*' Then, sire, you will like me. I am my Essays."

16 GARDEN-CRAFT.

of his plants, and is familiar with all their humours ;
like a good host, he has his eye on all his company.
He has fine schemes for the future of the place.
The very success of the garden reflects upon its
master, and advertises the perfect understanding that
exists between the artist and his materials. The
sense of ownership and responsibility brings him
satisfaction, of a cheaper sort. His the hand that
holds the wand to the garden's magic ; his the
initiating thought, the stamp of taste, the style that
gives it circumstance. Let but his hand be with-
drawn a space, and, at this signal, the gipsy horde
of weeds and briars — that even now peer over the
fence, and cast clandestine seeds abroad with every
favouring gust of wind — would at once take leave to
pitch their tents within the garden's zone, would
strip the place of art-conventions, and hurry it back
to its primal state of unkempt wildness.

Someone has observed that when wonder is
excited, and the sense of beauty gratified, there is
instant recreation, and a stimulus that lifts one out
of life's ordinary routine. This marks the function
of a garden in a world where, but for its presence,
the commonplace might preponderate ; 'tis man's
recreation-ground, children's fairyland, bird's or-
chestra, butterfly's banquet. Verse and romance
have done well, then, to link it with pretty thoughts
and soft musings, with summer reveries and moon-
light ecstasies, with love's occasion, and youth's
yearning. No fitter place could well be found than
this for the softer transactions of life that awaken

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 17

love, poesy, and passion. Indeed, were its winsome-
ness not balanced by simple human enjoyments —
were its charmed silences not broken by the healthy
interests of common daily life — the romps of children,
the clink of tea-cups, the clatter of croquet-mallets,
the melee of the tennis-courts, the fiddler's scrape,
and the tune of moving feet, it might well seem too
lustreful a place for this work-a-day world.

Apart from its other uses, there is no spot like a
garden for cultivating the kindly social virtues. Its
perfectness puts people upon their best behaviour.
Its nice refinement secures the mood for politeness.
Its heightened beauty produces the disposition that
delights in what is beautiful in form and colour. Its
queenly graciousness of mien inspires the reluctant
loyalty of even the stoniest mind. Here, if any-
where, will the human hedgehog unroll himself and
deign to be companionable. Here friend Smith,
caught by its nameless charm, will drop his brassy
gabble and dare to be idealistic ; and Jones, forgetful
of the main chance and " bulls " and " bears," will
throw the rein to hjs sweeter self, and reveal that
latent elevation of soul and tendency to romance
known only to his wife !

"There be delights," says an ancient writer,
" that will fetch the day about from sun to sun,
and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream."
This tells, in terse English, the pleasures of a garden
and the instincts that are gratified in its making.
For a garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's
bit of gaudy make-believe — his well-disguised fiction

c

18 GARDEN-CRAFT.

of an un vexed Paradise — standing witness of his quest
of the ideal — his artifice to escape the materialism of
a world that is too actual and too much with him.
A well-kept garden makes credible to modern eyes
the antique fable of an unspoiled world — a world
where gaiety knows no eclipse, and winter and
rough weather are held at bay. In this secluded
spot the seasons slip by unawares. The year's
passing-bell is ignored. Decay is cheated of its
prize. The invading loss of cold, or wind, or rain —
the litter of battered Nature — the " petals from blown
roses on the grass " — the pathos of dead boughs and
mouldering leaves, the blighted bloom and broken
promise of the spring, autumn's rust or winter's
wreckage are, if gardeners be brisk sons of Adam,
instantly huddled out of sight, so that, come when
you may, the place wears a mask of steady bright-
ness ; each month has its new dress, its fresh coun-
terfeit of permanence, its new display of flowers or
foliage, as pleasing, if not so lustrous as the last,
that serves in turn to prolong the illusion and to
conceal the secret irony and fond assumption of the

thing.

" I think for to touche also
The world which neweth everie daie,
So far as I can, so as I maie."

This snatch of Gower's rhyme expresses in old
phrase the gardener's desire, or clothed in modern
prose by Mr. Robinson (" English Flower-Garden,"
Murray), it is " to make each place at various
seasons, and in every available situation, an epitome
of the great flower-garden of the world."

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 19

We hinted a moment ago of the interest that a
garden gathers from the mark of man's regard and
tendence ; and if this be true of a modern garden,
how much more true of an old one ! Indeed, this
is undeniable in the latter case, for Time is ever
friendly to gardens. Ordinarily his attitude towards
all that concerns the memories of man is that of a
jealous churl. Look at history. What is history
but one long record of men who, in this sphere or
that, have toiled, striven, sold their souls even, to
perpetuate a name and have their deeds written upon
the tablets of eternity, not reckoning upon the " all-
oblivious enmity " of Time, who, with heedless hand,
cuts their past into fragments, blots out their name,
confuses their story, and frets with gnawing tooth
each vestige of their handiwork. How, then, we
ask —

" How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower ? "

Yet so it is. He who has no respect for antique
glories, who snaps his fingers at earth's heroes, who
overturns the statues of the laurelled Caesars, en-
crusts the hieroglyphics of the Pharaohs, and commits
their storied masonry to the mercies of the modern
Philistine, will make exception in a garden. " Time's
pencil " helps a garden. In a garden not only are
the solemn shapes and passing conceits of grey
epochs treasured up, even to their minutest particu-
lars, but the drift of the years, elsewhere so dis-
astrous, serves only to heighten their fascination and
power of appeal.

C 2

20 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Thus it comes to pass, that it were scarcely
possible to name a more pathetic symbol of the past
than an old garden,* nor a spot which, by its tell-tale
shapes, sooner lends itself to our historic sense if we
would recall the forms and reconstruct the life of our
ancestors. For we have here the very setting of old
life — the dressed stage of old drama, the scenery of
old gallantry. Upon this terrace, in front of these
flower-beds with these trees looking on, was fought
out the old battle of right and wrong — here was
enacted the heroic or the shameful deeds, the stirring
or the humdrum passages in the lives of so many
generations of masters, mistresses, children, and
servants, who in far-off times have lived, loved, and
died in the grey homestead hard by. " Now they
are dead," as Victor Hugo says — "they are dead,
but the flowers last always."

Admit, then, that for their secret quality, no less
than for their obvious beauty, these old gardens
should be treasured. For they are far more than
they seem to the casual observer. Like any other
piece of historic art, the old garden is only truly
intelligible through a clear apprehension of the
circumstances which attended its creation. Granted
that we possess the ordinary smattering of historical

* Time does much for a garden. There is a story of an American
plutocrat's visit to Oxford. On his tour of the Colleges nothing struck
him so much as the velvety turf of some of the quadrangles. He
asked for the gardener, and made minute enquiries as to the method
of laying down, and maintaining the grass. "That's all, is it?" he
exclaimed, when the process had been carefully described. " Yes,
sir," replied the gardener with a twinkle in his eye, " That's all, but
we generally leave it three or four centuries to settle down ! "

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 21

knowledge, and the garden will serve to interpret the
past and make it live again before our eyes. For
the old place is (to use the journalist's phrase) an
" object lesson " of old manners ; it is a proof of
ancient genius, a clue to old romance, a legacy of
vague desire. The many items of the place — the
beds and walks with their special trick of " style" —
the parterre, the promenoir, the maze, the quincunx,
the terraces, the extravagances in ever-green
sculptures of which Pope spoke — what are they
but the mould and figure of old-world thought,
down to its most characteristic caprice ! The
assertive air of these things — their prominence
in the garden-scenery — bespeak their importance in
the scenery of old life. It was thus that our fore-
fathers made the world about them picturesque, thus
that they coloured their life-dreams and fitted an
adjunct pleasure to every humour, thus that they
climbed by flower-strewn stairs to the realm of the
ideal and stimulated their sense of beauty.

And if further proof be needed of the large hold
the garden and its contents had of the affections of
past generations, we have but to turn to the old
poets, and to note how the texture of the speech,
the groundwork of the thought, of men like Milton,
Herrick, Vaughan, Herbert, Donne (not to mention
prose-writers) is saturated through and through
with garden-imagery.

In the case of an old garden, mellowed by time,
we have, I say, to note something that goes beyond
mere surface-beauty. Here we may expect to find

22 GARDEN-CRAFT.

a certain superadded quality of pensive interest,
which, so far as it can be reduced to words, tells of
the blent influences of past and present, of things
seen and unseen, of the joint effects of Nature and
Man. The old ground embodies bygone conceptions
of ideal beauty ; it has absorbed human thought
and memories ; it registers the bequests of old
time. Dead men's traits are exemplified here. The
dead hand still holds sway, the pictures it conjured
still endure, its cunning is not forgotten, its strokes
still make the garden's magic, in shapes and hues
that are unchanged save for the slow moulding of
the centuries. Really, not less than metaphorically,
the garden-growths do keep green the memories of
the men and women who placed them there, as the
flower that is dead still holds its perfume. And few
will say that the chronicles of the dead do not

" Shine more bright in these contents
Than unwept stone besmeared with sluttish time."

There is a wealth of quiet interest in an old gar-
den. We feel instinctively that the place has been
warmed by the sunshine of humanity ; watered from
the secret spring of human joy and sorrow. Sleeping
echoes float about its glades ; its leafy nooks can tell
of felicities sweeter than the bee-haunted cups of
flowers ; of glooms graver than the midnight black-
ness of the immemorial yews. It is their suggestion
of antique experiences that endues the objective
elements in an old garden like Haddon, or Berkeley,
or Levens, or Rockingham, with a strange eloquence.
The recollections of many a child have centred

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 23

round these objects : the one touch of romance
in a narrow, simple life is linked with them.
Hearts danced or hearts drooped in this vicinity,
Eyes that brimmed over with laughter or that were
veiled with tears looked on these things as we look
on them now — drank in the shifting lights and
shadows on the grass — watched the waving of the
cedar's dark layers of shade against an angry sky,
" stern as the unlashed eye of God/' and all the
birds were silent — once took in the sylvan vistas of
trees, lawn, fir-ridge, the broad-water where the
coots and moor-hens now play (as then) among the
green lily-pads and floating weeds, regardless of
Regulas in lead standing in their midst ; once dwelt
upon the lustrous flower-beds, on the sun-dial on the
terrace — noonday rendezvous of fantails — on the
"Alley of Sighs," with its clipped beeches, its grey-
stone seat half-way down, its rustle of dying leaves,
and traditions of intrigue ; on the lime avenue full
of perfume in the sweet-o'-the-year, on the foot-
bridge across the moat, on the streak of blue autumn
mist that tracks the stream in yonder meadows
where the landrail is croaking, and that brings
magically near the beat of hoofs, the jingle of horses'
bells, the rumble of homeward wagons on the road,
and whifts of the reapers' songs ; on the brief bril-
liance of the garden-panorama as the wintry-moon
gives the black clouds the slip and suddenly discloses
a white world of snow-muffled forms, that gleams
with the eerie pallor of a ghost, and is as suddenly
dissolved into darkness.

24 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Simple sights, you will say, and familiar ! and
yet, when connected with some unique occasion,
some epoch of a life, when seen on such a day, at
such a supreme, all-absorbing moment from window,
open door, terrace, arbour; in the stillness or in
the wild rhetoric of the night, the familiar scene,
momentarily flashed upon the brain's retina, may
have subtly and unconsciously influenced the act, or
coloured the thought of some human being, and the
brand of that moment's impress may have accom-
panied that soul to the edge of doom.

Because of its hoarded memories we come to
look upon an old garden as a sort of repository of
old secrets ; wrapped within its confines, as within
the covers of a sacred book, repose so many pages
of the sad and glad legend of humanity. We have
before us the scenery of old home idylls, of old
household reverences and customs, of old life's give
and take — its light comedy or solemn farce, its dark
tragedy, its summer masque, its stately dance or
midnight frolic, its happy wedlock or its open sorrow,
its endured wrong. The place is identified with the
fortunes of old families : for so many generations has
the old place been found favourable for lovers' tales,
for youths' golden dreams, for girls' chime of fancy,
for the cut and thrust of friendly wrangles, for the
" leisures of the spirit " of student-recluse, for chil-
dren's gambols and babies' lullabies. Seated upon
this mossy bank, children have spelt out fairy tales,
while birds, trees, brooks, and flowers listened to-
gether. The marvel of its cloistered grace has been

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN.

God-reminder to the saint ; its green recesses have
served for Enoch's walk,* for poet's retreat ; as
refuge for the hapless victim of broken endeavour ;
as enisled shelter for the tobacco-loving sailor-uncle
with a wrecked fame ; as invalid's Elysium ; as
haunt of the loafing, jesting, unambitioned man
(" Alas, poor Yorick!"); as Death's sweet ante-room
for slow-footed age.

What wonder that Sir William Temple devised
that his heart should rest where its memories
were so deep-intrenched — in his garden ; or that
Waterton should ask to be buried between the
two great oaks at the end of the lake ! (Norman
Moore's Introduction to " Wanderings in South
America.")

And if human affections be, as the poets declare,
immortal, we have the reason why an old garden,
in the only sense in which it ever is old, by the
almanack, has that whisper and waving of secrecy,
that air of watchful intentness, that far-reaching,
mythological, unearthly look, that effect of being a
kind of twilighted space common to the two worlds
of past and present. Who will not agree with me
in this ? It matters not when you go there — at
dawn, at noonday, no less than when the sky is
murky and night-winds are sighing — and although
you shall be the only visible human being present, it
is not alone that you feel. A thrill comes over you,
a mysterious sense warns you that this is none other

* " There is no garden well contrived, but 'that which hath an
Enoch's walk in it."— SIR W. WALLER.

26 GARDEN-CRAFT.

than the sanctuary of " the dead," as we call them ;
the place where, amid the hush of passionless exis-
tence, the wide leisure of uncounted time, the shades
of once familiar presences keep their " tongueless
vigil." They fly not at the " dully sound " of human
footsteps ; they ask no sympathy for regret which
dare not tell the secret of its sorrow ; but, with the
gentle gait of old-world courtesy, they move aside,
and when you depart resume occupation of ground
which, for the sake of despairing wishes and
memories of an uneffaced past, they may not quit.
After life's fitful fever these waifs of a vanished
world sleep not well ; here are some consumed with
covetousness, who are learning not to resent the
word " mine " applied by the living owner of hall
and garden, field and store ; some that prey on
withered bliss — the " bitter sweet of days that
were " — this, the miser whose buried treasure lies
undiscovered here, and who has nothing in God's
bank in the other world ; this, the author of the
evil book ; and this loveless, unlovely pair, the
ruined and ruiner, yoked for aye ; a motley band,
forsooth, with " Satan's sergeants ' keeping
guard !

It is ever the indirect that is most eloquent.
Someone says : Hence these tokens of a dead
past open out vistas for one's imagination and drop
hints of romance that would make thrilling read-
ing in many volumes, but which shall never reach
Mudie's.

Even Nature is not proof against the spell of an

ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN. 27

old garden. The very trees have an " ancient
melody of an inward agony " :

" The place is silent and aware
It has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes,
But that is its own affair "-

even Nature forgets to be her cold, impassive self,
and puts on a sympathetic-waiting look in a spot so
intricately strewn and meshed over with the fibres of
human experience. Long and close intimacy with
mankind under various aspects — witness of things
that happened to squires, dames, priests, courtiers,
servitors, page, or country-maid, in the roundabout
of that " curious, restless, clamorous being which
we call life " — has somehow tinged the place with a
sensibility (one had almost said a wizardry) not
properly its own. And this superadded quality
reaches to the several parts of the garden and is not
confined to the scene as a whole Each inanimate
item of the place, each spot, seems invested with a
gift of attraction — to have a hidden tongue that
could syllable forgotten names — to possess a power
of fixing your attention, of fastening itself upon your
mind, as though it had become, in a sense, humanised,
and claimed kindred with you as related to that
secret group with whose fortunes it was allied, with
whose passions it had held correspondence, and
were letting you know it could speak an if it would
of

" All the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."

CHAPTER II.

ON ART IN A GARDEN.

" O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty."

ROBERT BROWNING.

IN dealing with our second point — the ornamental
treatment that is fit and right for a garden — we are
naturally brought into contact with the good and bad
points of both the old and the new systems of
gardening. This being so, it may be well at once
to notice the claims of the modern " Landscape-
gardener" to monopolise to himself all the right
principles of garden-craft : all other moods than his
are low, all figures other than his are symbols of
error, all dealings with Nature other than his are
mere distortions.

If you have any acquaintance with books upon
landscape-gardening written by its professors or
their admirers, you will have learnt that in the first
half of the eighteenth century, two heaven-directed
geniuses — Kent and Brown — all of a sudden
stumbled upon the green world of old England, and,
perceiving its rural beauties, and the hitherto unex-
plored opportunities for ornamental display that the
country afforded, these two put their heads together,

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 29

and out of their combined cogitations sprang the
English garden.

This, in brief, is what the landscape-gardener
and his adherents say, and would have you believe ;
and, to prove their point, they lay stress upon the style
of garden in vogue at the time Kent and Brown began
their experiments, when, forsooth, traditional garden-
craft was in its dotage and had lost its way in the
paths of pedantry.

Should you, however, chance to have some
actual knowledge of old gardens, and some insight
into the principles which, consciously or unconsciously
governed their making, it may occur to you to ask
the precise points wherein the new methods claim to
be different from the old, what sources of inspiration
were discovered by the new school of gardeners that
were not shared by English gardeners from time
immemorial. Are there, then, two arts of gardening ?
or two sorts of Englishmen to please ? Is not
modern garden-craft identical with the old, so far,
indeed, as it have art enough to stand any comparison
with the other at all ?

Let us here point to the fact, that any garden
whatsoever is but Nature idealised, pastoral scenery
rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters not what
the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an
idealisation of Nature. Real nature exists outside
the artist and apart from him. The Ideal is that
which the artist conceives to be an interpretation of
the outside objects, or that which he adds to the
objects. The garden gives imaginative form to

3o GARDEN-CRAFT.

emotions the natural objects have awakened in man.
The raison d'etre of a garden is man's feeling the
ensemble.

One fine day you take your architect for a jaunt
along a country-lane, until stopping shyly in front of
a five-barred gate, over which is nailed an ominous
notice-board, you introduce him to your small
property, the site of your new house. It is a field
very much like the neighbouring fields — at least, so
think the moles, and the rooks, and the rabbits ; not
you, for here is to be your " seat " for life ; and
before you have done with it, the whole country far
and near will be taught to look as though it radiated
round the site and the house you will build upon
it — an honour of which, truth compels me to say, the
land betrays not the remotest presentiment just
now !

The field in question may be flat or undulating,
it may be the lap of a hillside, the edge of a moor,
a treeless stretch of furrowed land with traces of
" rude mechanical's " usage, or suggestions of mut-
ton or mangels. The particular character of the
place, or its precise agricultural past, matters not,
however ; suffice it to say that it is a bit of raw, and
more or less ungroomed, Nature.

Upon this plain, unadorned field, you set your
man of imagination to work. He must absorb both
it and its whole surroundings into his brain, and
seize upon all its capabilities. He must produce
symmetry and balance where now are ragged out-
lines of hillocks and ridges. He must trim and

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 31

cherish the trees here, abolish the tree there ; en-
large this slope, level that ; open out a partial peep
of blue distance here, or a gleam of silver water
there. He must terrace the slope, step by step, to-
wards the stream at the base, select the sunniest
spots for the flower-beds, and arrange how best the
gardens at their varying levels shall be approached
or viewed from the house. In this way and that he
must so manoeuvre the perspective and the lights and
shades, so compose or continue the sectional lines
and general bearings of the ground as to enforce the
good points that exist, and draw out the latent possi-
bilities of the place, and this with as easy a hand,
and as fine tact as the man can muster.

And now to come to our point. A dressed gar-
den, I said, is Nature idealised — pastoral scenery put
fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is a master of
what the French writer calls " the charming art of
touching up the truth."

Emerson observes that all the Arts have their
origin in some enthusiasm ; and the art of gardening
has for its root, man's enthusiasm for the woodland
world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees
and landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to
speak, passed from the stage of emotion to that of
form. A garden is the result of the emulation which
the vision of beaut}^ in the world at large is ever
provoking in man—

" Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landskip round it measures."

What of Nature has affected man on various

32 GARDEN-CRAFT.

occasions, what has pleased his eye in different moods,
played upon his emotions, pricked his fancy, sug-
gested reverie, stirred vague yearnings, brought a
sense of quickened joy — pastoral scenery, the music of
leaves and waters, the hues and sweetness of country
ilowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form of
tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh,
autumn's glow, summer's bravery, winter's grey
blanched face — each thing that has gone home to
him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania.
Inspired by their beauty and mystery, he has gathered
them to himself about his home, has made a
microcosm out of the various detached details which
sum up the qualities, features, and aspects of the
open country ; and the art of this little recreated
world is measured by the happy union of naturalness
and of calculated effect.

What sources of inspiration were discovered by
the new school of gardeners, I asked a moment ago,
which were not spared by English gardeners from
time immemorial ? The art of gardening, I said, has
its root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world.
See how closely the people of old days must have
observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the embroi-
dery of the meadows, the livery of the woods £t
different seasons, or they would not have been capable
of building up that piece of hoarded loveliness, the
old-fashioned English garden !

The pleasaunce of old days has been mostly
stubbed up by the modern " landscape gardener,"
but if no traces of them were left we have still here

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 33

and there the well-schemed surroundings of our
English homes — park, avenue, wood, and water —
the romantic scenery that hems in Tintern, Fountains,
Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the
English for planting. If the tree, shrub, .and flower
be gone from the grounds outside the old Tudor
mansion, there still remains the blue-green world in
the tapestries upon the walls, with their airy land-
scapes of trees and hills, hanging-gardens, flower-
beds, terraces, and embowered nooks — a little fan-
tastical it may be, but none thje less eloquent of
appreciation of natural beauty not confined to the
gardener, but shared by the artist-maid, who

" with her neeld composes
Nature's own shape, of bird, branch, or berry,
That even Art sisters the natural roses."

And should these relics be gone, we still have the
books in the library, rich in Nature-allusion. The
simple ecstasies of the early ballad in the opening
stanzas of " Robin Hood and the Monk " —

" In somer when the shawes be sheyne,

And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song ;

To se the dere draw to the dale,

And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene,

Under the grene- wode tre" ;

or in a " Musical Dreame "—

" Now wend we home, stout Robin Hood,

Leave we the woods behind us.
Love passions must not be withstood,

Love everywhere will find us.
I livde in fielde and downe, and so did he ;
I got me to the woods, love followed me."

D

GARDEN-CRAFT.

or shall we hear tell from Chaucer how

" When that Aprille, with his showres swoot
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,

Then longen folk to gone on pilgrimages."

Or hear from Stowe how the cockney of olden
days " In the month of May, namely, on May-day in
the morning, every man, except impediment, would
walk in the sweet meddowes and green woods, ther
to rejoyce their spirits with the beauty and savour of
sweet flowers and with the harmonie of birds
praysing God in their kinde."

Or shall we turn to Shakespeare's bright inci-
dental touches of nature-description as in Perdita's
musical enumeration of the flowers of the old stiff
garden-borders " to make you garlands of," or the
Queen's bit in " Hamlet," beginning

" There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream."

Or to the old Herbals of Wyer, and Turner, and
Gerard, whom Richard Jefferies * pictures walking
about our English lanes in old days ? " What won-
derful scenes he must have viewed when they were
all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants that are now
scarce were common, and the old ploughs and the
curious customs, and the wild red-deer — it would
make a good picture, it really would, Gerard study-
ing English orchids ! "

Or shall we take down the classic volumes
of Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Cowley, Isaak Walton,

* " Field and Hedgerow," p. 27.

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 35

Gilbert White, each in his day testifying to the
inborn love of the English for woodland scenery,
their study of nature, and their taste in trees, shrubs,
and flowers. What a vindication is here of the' old-
fashioned garden and gardener ! What nonsense to
set up Kent and Brown as the discoverers of the
green world of old England, when, as Mr. Hamerton
remarks in " The Sylvan Year" (p. 173), Chaucer hardly
knows how or when to stop whenever he begins to
talk about his enjoyment of Nature. " Chaucer," he
says, " in his passion for flowers, and birds, and spring
mornings in the woods, and by streams, is hard to
quote, for he leads you down to the bottom of the
page, and over the leaf, before you have time to
pause."

The question now before us — " What ornament is
fit and right for a garden ? " — of itself implies a ten-
dency to err in the direction of ornament. We see
that on the face of it the transposition of the simple
of Nature into the subtle of Art has its dangers.
Something may be put, or something may be left,
which were best absent. This may be taken as an
established fact. In making a garden you start with
the assumption that something must be sacrificed of
wild Nature, and something must be superadded,
and that which is superadded is not properly of this
real, visible world, but of the world of man's brain.

The very enclosure of our garden-spaces sig-
nifies that Nature is held in duress here. Nature
of herself cannot rise above Nature, and man, seeing
perfections through her imperfections, capacities

D 2

36 GARDEN-CRAFT.

through her incapacities, shuts her in for cultivation,
binds her feet, as it were, with the silken cord of
art-constraint, and puts a gloss of intention upon her
every feature.

In a garden Nature is not to be her simple self,
but is to be subject to man's conditions, his choice,
his rejection. Let us briefly see, now, what con-
ditions man may fairly impose upon Nature — what
lengths he may legitimately go in the way of mimicry
of natural effects or of conventionalism. Both books
and our own observation tell us that where the past
generations of gardeners have erred it has been
through a misconception of the due proportions of
realism and of idealism to be admitted into a garden.
At this time, in this phase, it was Art, in that phase
it was Nature, that was carried too far ; here design
was given too much rein, there not rein enough, and
people in their silly revolt against Art have gone
straight for the " veracities of Nature," copying her
features, dead or alive, outright, without discrimina-
tion as to their fitness for imitation, or their suitable-
ness to the position assigned to them. To what
extent, we ask, may the forms of Nature be copied
or re-cast ? What are the limits to which man may
carry ideal portraiture of Nature for the purposes of
Art ? Questions like these would, of course, only
occur to a curious, debating age like ours ; but put
this way or that they keep alive the eternal prob-
lems of man's standing to the world of Nature, the
laws of idealism and realism, the nice distinctions of
11 more and less."

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 37

Now, it is not everything in Nature that can, or
that may be, artificially expressed in a garden ; nor
are the things that it is permissible to use, of equal
application everywhere. It were a palpable mistake,
an artistic crime, so to speak, to follow the wild
flights of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin, and
with them to attempt a little amateur creation in the
way of rent rocks, tumbled hillsides, and ruins that
suggest a recent geological catastrophe, or antique
monsters, or that imply by the scenery that we are
living in the days of wattled abodes and savages
with flint hatchets. Much, of course, may be done
in this line in these days as in the past, if only one
have sufficient audacity and a volcanic mind ; yet,
when it is done, both the value and the Tightness of
the art of the thing is questionable. "Canst thou
catch Leviathan with a hook ? " The primaeval throes,
the grand stupendous imagery of Nature should be
held in more reverence. It were almost as fit to
harness a polar bear to the gardener's mowing-
machine as seek to appropriate the eerie phenomena
of Nature in her untamed moods for the ornamental
purposes of a garden. And as to the result of such
work, the ass draped in the lion's skin, roaring
horribly, with peaked snout and awkward shanks
visible all the while, is not more ridiculous than the
thinly-veiled savagery of an Italian garden of the
seventeenth century.

Here, then, I think we have some guidance as to
the principles which should regulate the choice of
the " properties " that are fit for the scenic show of

38 GARDEN-CRAFT.

a garden. We should follow the dictates of good
taste and of common sense. Of things applied
direct from Nature the line should be drawn at the
gigantesque, the elemental, the sad, the gruesome,
the crude. True, that in art of another kind —
in Architecture or in Music — the artistic equivalents
of these qualities may find place, but as garden
effects they are eminently unsuitable, except, indeed,
where it is desired to perpetrate a grim joke.

Beyond these limitations, however, all is open
ground for the imaginative handling of the true gar-
dener ; and what a noble residue remains ! Nature
in her health and wealth — green, opulent, lusty
Nature is at his feet. Of things gay, debonair, subtle,
and refined — things that stir poetic feelings or that
give joy — he may take to himself and conjure with to
the top of his bent. It is for him as for the poet in
Sir Philip Sidney's words — " So as he goeth hand
in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow
warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the
zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the
earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done ;
neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-
smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the
too-much loved earth more lovely : her world is
brazen, the poets only deliver a golden."

Animated with corresponding desire, the gardener
resorts to lovely places in this " too-much loved
earth," there to find his stock-in-trade and learn his
craft. We watch him as he hies to the bravery of
the spring-flowers in sunny forest-glades; to meadow-

ON ART IN A GARDEN. 39

flats where lie the golden host of daffodils, the lady-
smocks, and snake-spotted fritillaries ; we see him
bend his way to the field of bluebells, the hill of
primroses that with

" their infinitie
Make a terrestrial gallaxie
As the smal starres do the skie ; "

we follow him to the tangled thicket with its
meandering walks carpeted with anemones and hung
over with sweet-scented climbers ; to the sombre
boskage of the wood, where the shadows leap from
their ambush in unexpected places and the brown
bird's song floats upon the wings of silence : to
the green dell with its sequestered pool edged round
with alders, and willow-herb, and king-fern, and
mountain-ash afire with golden fruit : to the corn-
field "a-flutter with poppies" : to the broad-terraced
downs — its short, springy turf dotted over with
white sheets of thorn-blossom : to the leaping,
shining mountain-tarn that comes foaming out of the
wood : to the pine-grove with its columned black-
ness and dense thatch of boughs that lisp the
message of the wind, and " teach light to counterfeit
a gloom " ; to the widespread landscape with its
undulating forest, its clumps of foliage, its gleams of
white-beam, silver-birch, or golden yew, amid the
dark blue of firs and hollies; its emerald meadows,
yellow gorse-covers and purple heather ; the many
tones of leafage in the spring and fall of the year.

And here I give but a few random sketches of
Nature, taken almost at random from the portfolio of

40 GARDEN-CRAFT.

her painted delights — a dozen or more vignettes,
shall we say ? — ready-made for garden-distribution
in bed, bank, wilderness, and park ; things which
the old gardener freely employed ; features and
images which he transferred to his dressed grounds,
not copying them minutely but in an ideal manner ;
mixing his fancy with their fact, his compulsion with
their consent ; flavouring the simple with a dash of
the strange and marvellous, combining dreams and
actualities, things seen, with things born " within
the zodiac of his own wit " ; frankly throwing into
the compacted glamour of the place all that will give
kclat to Nature and teach men to apprehend new

joy-

So, then, after separating the brazen from the
golden in Nature — after excluding " properties " of
the woodland world which are demonstrably unfit
for the scenic show of a garden, how ample the
scope for artistic creation in the things that remain !
And, given an acre or two of land that has some
natural capabilities, some charm of environment —
given a generous client, a bevy of workmen, horses
and carts, and, prime necessity of all, a pleasant
homestead in the foreground to prompt its own
adornment and be the centre of your efforts, and,
upon the basis of these old tracks of Nature and old
themes of Art, what may not one hope to achieve of
pretty garden-effects that shall please the eye, flatter
the taste, and captivate the imagination of such as
love Beauty !

CHAPTER III.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF THE
ENGLISH GARDEN.

" The Earth is the garden of Nature, and each fruitful country a
Paradise."— SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

IN the last chapter I observed that in dealing
with our second point — the ornamental treatment
that is fit for a garden — we should be brought into
contact with the good and bad points of both the old
and new systems of gardening. Hence the following
discursus upon the historic English garden, which
will, however, be as short as it can well be made,
not only because the writer has no desire to wander
on a far errand when his interest lies near home, but
also because an essay, such as this, is ever bound to
be an inconclusive affair ; and 'twere a pity to lay a
heavy burden upon a light horse !

At the outset of this section of our enquiry it is
well to realise that there is little known about the
garden of earlier date than the middle of the sixteenth
century. Our knowledge of the mediaeval garden is
only to be acquired piecemeal, out of casual references
in old chronicles, and stray pictures in illuminated

42 GARDEN-CRAFT.

manuscripts, and in each case allowance must be
made for the fluent fancy of the artist. Moreover,
early notices of gardens deal mostly with the orchard,
or the vegetable or herb garden, where flowers grown
for ornament occur in the borders of the ground.

It is natural to ascribe the first rudiments of hor-
ticultural science in this country to the Romans ;
and with the classic pastorals, or Pliny the Younger's
Letter to Apollinaris before us, in which an elabo-
rate garden is minutely and enthusiastically described,
we need no further assurance of the fitness of the
Roman to impart skilled knowledge in all branches
of the science.

Loudon, in his noble " Arboretum et fruticetum
Britannicum," enters at large into the question of
what trees and shrubs are indigenous to Britain, and
gives the probable dates of the introduction of such
as are not native to this country. According to
Whitaker, whose authority Loudon adopts, it would
appear that the Romans brought us the plane, the
box, the elm, the poplar, and the chestnut. (The
lime, he adds, was not generally planted here till
after the time of Le Notre : it was used extensively
in avenues planted here in the reign of Charles the
Second.) Of fruit trees, the Roman gave us the pear,
the fig, the damson, cherry, peach, apricot, and
quince. The aboriginal trees known to our first
ancestors are the birch, alder, oak, wild or Scotch
pine, mountain-ash or rowan-tree, the juniper, elder,
sweet-gale, dog-rose, heath, St. John's wort, and the
mistletoe.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 43

Authorities agree in ascribing the introduction of
many other plants, fruit trees, and trees of ornament
or curiosity now common throughout England, to the
monks. And the extent of our indebtedness to the
monks in this matter may be gathered from the fact
that monasteries abounded here in early times ; and
the religious orders have in all times been enthusi-
astic gardeners. Further be it remembered, many of
the inmates of our monasteries were either foreigners
or persons who had been educated in Italy or France,
who would be well able to keep this country supplied
with specimens and with reminiscences of the styles
of foreign gardens up to date.

The most valuable authority on the subject of
early English gardens is Alexander Necham, Abbot
of Cirencester (1157-1217). His references are in
the shape of notes from a commonplace-book entitled
" Of the Nature of Things," and he writes thus :
" Here the garden should be adorned with roses and
lilies, the turnsole (heliotrope), violets and mandrake ;
there you should have parsley, cost, fennel, southern-
wood, coriander, sage, savery, hyssop, mint, rue,
dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuces, garden-cress,
and peonies. . . . A noble garden will give thee
also medlars, quinces, warden-trees, peaches, pears
of St. Riole, pomegranates, lemons, oranges, almonds,
dates, which are the fruits of palms, figs, &c."* Here,
in truth, is a delightful medley of the useful and the
beautiful, just like life ! Yet the very use of the
term " noble," as applied to a garden, implies that
* See " The Praise of Gardens."

44 GARDEN-CRAFT.

even the thirteenth-century Englishman had a stan-
dard of excellence to stir ambition. Other garden
flowers mentioned in Alexander's observations are
the sunflower, the iris and narcissus.

The garden described by Necham [bespeaks an
amount of taste in the arrangement of the herbs,
plants, and fruit-trees, but in the main it corresponds
with our kitchen-garden. The next English writer
upon gardens in point of date is Johannes de Gar-
landia, an English resident in France ; but here is
a description of the writer's garden at Paris. The
ground here described consists of shrubbery, wood,
grove, and garden, and from the account given it is
inferred that both in matters of taste and in the
horticultural and floral products of the garden, France
had advanced farther than England in garden-craft
in the fourteenth century, which is the date of the
book.

In Mr. Hudson Turner's " Observations on the
State of Horticulture in England " * in olden times
he gives notices of the early dates in which the rose
was under cultivation. In the thirteenth century
King John sends a wreath of roses to his lady-love.
Chronicles inform us that roses and lilies were
among the plants bought for the Royal Garden at
Westminster in 1276; and the annual rendering of
a rose is one of the commonest species of quit-rent
in ancient conveyances, like the " pepper-corn " of
later times. The extent to which the culture of the
rose was carried is inferred from the number of sorts

* "Archaeological Journal," vol. v., p. 295.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 45

mentioned in old books, which include the red, the
sweet-musk, double and single, the damask, the vel-
vet, the double-double Provence rose, and the double
and single white rose. And the demand for roses
seems to have been so great in old days that bushels
of them frequently served as the payment of vassals
to their lords, both in France and England. England
has good reason to remember the distinction between
the red and the white rose.

Of all the flowers known to our ancestors, the
gilly-flower was perhaps the most common.

" The fairest flowers o' the season
Are our carnations and streak'd gilly flowers."

Winter's Tale.

" Their use," says a quaint writer, "is much in orna-
ment, and comforting the spirites by the sence of
smelling." The variety of this flower, that was best
known in early times, was the wall gilly-flower, or
bee-flower. Another flower of common growth in
mediaeval gardens and orchards is the periwinkle.

" There sprang- the violet all newe,
And fresh periwinkle, rich of hewe,
And flowers yellow, white and rede,
Such plenty grew there nor in the mede."

It is not considered probable that much art was
expended in the laying out of gardens before the
fifteenth century ; but I give a list of illuminated
MSS. in the Library of the British Museum, where
may be found illustrations of gardens, and which I
take from Messrs. Birch and Jenner's valuable Die-

46 GARDEN-CRAFT.

tionary of Principal Subjects in the British Museum*
under the head of Garden.

There is also a typical example of a fourteenth-
century garden in the Romaunt d'Alexandre (Bodleian
Library). Here the flower garden or lawn is separ-
ated by a wooden paling from the orchard, where a
man is busy pruning. An old painting at Hampton
Court, of the early part of the sixteenth century,
gives pretty much the same class of treatment, but
here the paling is decorated with a chevron of white
and red colour.

To judge from old drawings, our forefathers seem
to have been always partial to the greensward
and trees, which is the landscape garden in the
« egg " ! A good extent of grass is always
provided. Formal flower-beds do not often
occur, and, where shown, they are sometimes
surrounded by a low wattled fence — a protection
against rabbits, probably. Seats and banks of
chamomile are not unusual. A bank of earth seems
to have been thrown up against the enclosing wail ;
the front of the bank is then faced with a low parti-

* " Early Drawings and Illuminations." Birch and Jenner.
(Bagster, 1879, P-
" Gardens.

19 D. i. ff. I. etc.

20 A. xvii. f. 7b.
20 B. ii. f. 57.

1 4 803 f. 63 .
18851 f. 182.
1 8 852 f. 3. b.
26667 f. i-

Harl. 4425. f. 12. b.
Kings 7. f. 57.
6E. ix. f. 15. b.
14 E. vi. f. 146.

15 E. iii. f. 122.

15 E. vi. f. 146.

16 G. v. f. 5.

17 F. i. f. 149 £.
19 A. vi. f. 2. 109.

19 C. vii. f. i.

20 C. v. ff. 7. etc.
Eg. 2022. f. 36. b.
Harl. 4425. f. 1 60 b.
19720.

19 A. vi. f. 109."

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 47

tion of brick or stone, and the mould, brought to an
even surface, is planted in various ways. Numerous
illustrations of the fifteenth century give a bowling-
green and butts for archery. About this date it is
assumed the style of English gardening was affected
by French and Flemish methods, which our connec-
tion with Burgundy at that time would bring about.
To this period is also ascribed the introduction of
the " mount " in England, although one would almost
say that it is but a survival of the Celtic " barrow."
It is a feature that came, however, into very common
use, and is thus recommended by Bacon : " I wish
also, in the very middle, a fair Mount, with three
Ascents and Alleys, enough for four to walk abreast,
which I would have to be perfect circles, without any
Bulwarks or Imbossments, and the whole Mount to be
thirty foot high, and some fine Banquetting House
with some chimneys neatly cast, and without too
much Glass."

The " mount " is said to have been originally
contrived to allow persons in the orchard to look
over the enclosing wall, and would serve not only as
a place from which to enjoy a pretty view, but as a
point of outlook in case of attack. Moreover, when
situated in a park where the deer grazed, the un-
scrupulous sportsman might from thence shoot a
buck. In early days the mounts were constructed
of wood or of stone, and were curiously adorned
within and without. Later on they resumed the
old barrow shape, and were made of earth, and uti-
lized for the culture of fruit trees. Lawson, an old

48 GARDEN-CRAFT.

writer of the sixteenth century, describes them as
placed in divers corners of the orchard, their ascent
being made by " stares of precious workmanship."
When of wood, the mount was often elaborately
painted.

An account of works done at Hampton Court in
the time of Henry VIII., mentions certain expenses
incurred for "anticke" works; and referring to Bailey's
Dictionary, published early in the last century, the word
('antick," as applied to curiously-shaped trees, still
survives, and is explained as " odd figures or shapes
of men, birds, beasts, &c., cut out." From the
above references, and others of like nature, we
know that the topiary art ("opus topiarum"), which
dealt in quaintly-shaped trees and shrubs, was in
full practice here throughout the latter half of the
middle ages. Samuel Hartlib, in a book published
in 1659, writes thus : "About fifty years ago Ingenu-
ities first began to flourish in England." Lawson,
writing in a jocose vein, tells how the lesser wood
might be framed by the gardener " to the shape of
men armed in the field ready to give battell ; or
swift-running greyhounds, or of well-sented and true-
running hounds to chase the deere or hunt the hare" ;
adding as a recommendation that " this kinde of
hunting shall not waste your corne, nor much your
coyne ! "

I find that John Leland in his Itinerary, 1540,
further confirms the use of highly-decorated mounts :
as at Wressel Castle, Yorkshire, he tells of the gar-
dens with the mote, and the orchards as exceeding

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 49

fair ; " and yn the orchardes were mounts writhen
about with degrees, like the turnings in cokil shelles,
to come to the top without payne." There is still
to be seen, or according to Murray's Guide, 1876,
was then to be seen, at Wotton, in Surrey, an
artificial mount cut into terraces, which is a relic of
Evelyn's work.

The general shape of an old-fashioned garden is
a perfect square, which we take to be reminiscent of
the square patch of ground which, in early days, was
partitioned off for the use of the family, and walled
to exclude cattle, or to define the property. It also
repeats the quadrangular court of big Tudor houses.
We may also assume that the shape would commend
itself to the taste of the Renascence School of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, as being that of classic
times ; for the antique garden was fashioned in a
square with enclosures of trellis-work, espaliers, and
dipt box hedges, regularly ornamented with vases,
fountains, and statuary.

The square shape was common to the French
and Italian gardens also. Old views of Du Cerceau,
an architect of the time of Charles IX. and Henry III.,
show a square in one part of the grounds and a
circular labyrinth in another : scarcely a plot but
has this arrangement. The point to note, however,
is, that while the English garden might take the
same general outline as the foreign, it had its own
peculiarities ; and although each country develops
the fantastic ornament common to the stiff garden of
the period in its own way, things are not carried to

E

50 GARDEN-CRAF7.

the same pitch of extravagant fancy in England as in
France, Holland, or Italy.

Upon a general review of the subject of orna-
mental gardens, English and foreign, we arrive at
the conclusion that the type of garden produced by
any country is a question of soil and physical
features, and a question of race. The character of
the scenery of a country, the section of the land
generally, no less than the taste of the people who
dwell in it, prescribes the style of the type of garden.
The hand of Nature directs the hand of Art.

Thus, in a hilly country like Italy, Nature herself
prompts the division of the garden-spaces into wide
terraces, while Art, on her side, provides that the
terraces shall be well-proportioned as to width
and height, and suitably defined by masonry walls
having balustraded fronts, flights of steps, arcades,
temples, vases, statues, &c.

Lady Mary Montagu's description of the Giardino
Jiusti is a case in point : she depicts, as far as words
can, how admirably it complies with the conditions
of the scenery. The palace lies at the foot of a
mountain " near three miles high, covered with a
wood of orange, lemon, citron, and pomegranate trees,
which is all cut up into walks, and divided into
terraces that you may go into a separate garden from
every floor of the house, diversified with fountains,
cascades, and statues, and joined by easy marble
staircases, which lead from one to another." It is a
hundred years since this description was written,
but the place is little altered to this day : " Who

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE.

will now take the pains to climb its steep paths, will
find the same charm in the aged cypresses, the
oddly clipped ilexes and boxes, the stiff terraces
and narrow, and now overgrown, beds." *

In France, where estates are larger, and the sur-
face of the country more even and regular, the orna-
mental grounds, while following the Italian in cer-
tain particulars, are of wider range on the flat, and
they attain picturesqueness upon lines of their own.
The taste of the people, conveniently answering
to the conditions of the country, runs upon long
avenues and spacious grounds, divided by massive
trellises into a series of ornamental sections —
Bocages, Cabinets de Verdure, &c., which by their form
and name, flatter the Arcadian sentiment of a race
much given to idealisation. " I am making winding
alleys all round my park, which will be of great
beauty," writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1671. "As to
my labyrinth, it is neat, it has green plots, and the
palisades are breast-high ; it is a lovable spot."

The French have parks, says the travelled Heutz-
ner, but nothing is more different, both in compass
and direction, than those common to England. In
France they invented the parks as fit surroundings
to the fine palaces built by Mansard and Le Notre,
and the owners of these stately chateaux gratified
their taste for Nature in an afternoon promenade on a
broad stone terrace, gazing over a carved balustrade
at a world made truly artificial to suit the period.
The style of Le Notre is, in fact, based upon the

* "The Garden."— Walter Howe.

E 2

52 GARDEN-CRAFT.

theory that Nature shall contribute a bare space upon
which man shall lay out a garden of symmetrical
character, and trees, shrubs, and flowers are re-
garded as so much raw material, out of which Art
shall carve her effects.

Indeed, the desire for symmetry is carried to such
extravagant lengths that the largest parks become
only a series of square or oblong enclosures, regu-
larly planted walks, bounded by chestnuts or limes;
while the gardens are equally cut up into lines of trel-
lises and palisades. In describing the Paris gardens
Horace Walpole says, " they form light corridors and
transpicuous arbours, through which the sunbeams
play and checker the shade, set off the statues, vases,
and flowers, that marry with their gaudy hotels, and
suit the gallant and idle society who paint the walks
between their parterres, and realise the fantastic
scenes of Watteau and Durfe !" In another place he
says that " many French groves seem green chests set
upon poles. In the garden of Marshall de Biron, at
Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is
button-holed on each side by lines of flower-pots,
which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it
there were nine thousand pots of asters or la Reine
Marguerite."

In Holland, which Butler sarcastically describes

as

" A land that rides at anchor, and is moor'd,
In which they do not live, but go aboard "-

the conditions are not favourable to gardening. Man
is here indebted to Nature, in the first place, for next

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 53

to nothing : Air, Earth, and Water are, as it were,
under his control. The trees grow, the rivers run,
as they are directed ; and the very air is made to pay
toll by means of the windmills.

To begin with, Holland has a meagre list of in-
digenous trees and shrubs, and scarcely an indigenous
ligneous flora. There is little wood in the country,
for the heavy winds are calculated to destroy high-
growing trees, and the roots cannot penetrate into the
ground to any depth, without coming to water. The
land is flat, and although artificial mountains of
granite brought from Norway and Sweden have been
erected as barriers against the sea, there is scarcely
a stone to be found except in the Island of Urk.

The conditions of the country being so unfavour-
able to artistic handling, it needs a determined effort
on man's part to lift things above the dead-level of
the mean and commonplace. Yet see how Nature's
defects may only prove Art's opportunity ! Indeed, it
is singular to note how, as it were, in a spirit of noble
contrariness, the Dutch garden exhibits the opposite
grace of each natural defect of the land. The great
plains intersected with sullen watercourses yield up
only slight strips of land, therefore these niggardly
strips, snatched from " an amphibious world " (as
Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty.
The landscape outside gapes with uniform dull-
ness, therefore the garden within shall be spick and
span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers no
objects for measuring distance, therefore the perspec-
tive of the garden shall be a marvel of adroit plan-

54 GARDEN-CRAFT.

ning and conjured proportions. The room is small,
therefore its every inch shall seem an ell. The garden
is a mere patch, therefore the patch shall be elabor-
ately darned and pattern-stitched all over. The eye
may not travel far, or can get no joy in a distant view,
therefore it shall rest in pure content, focussed upon a
scene where rich and orderly garniture can no far-
ther go.

Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved
blessings in disguise. Necessity, the mother of in-
vention, has produced the Dutch garden out of the
most untoward geography, and if we find in its quali-
ties and features traces of the conditions which sur-
rounded its birth and development it is no wonder.
Who shall blame the prim shapes and economical
culture where even gross deception shall pass for
a virtue if it be successful ! Or the regular strips of
ground, the long straight canals, the adroit vistas cf
grassy terraces long-drawn out, the trees ranged in
pots, or planted in the ground at set intervals and
carefully shorn to preserve the limit of their shade !
Nay, one can be merciful to the garden's usual
crowning touch, which you get at its far end — a
painted landscape of hills and dales and clumps of
trees to beguile the enamoured visitor into the fond
belief that Holland is not Holland : and, in the fore-
ground the usual smiling wooden boy, shooting
arrows at nothing, happy in the deed, and tin hares
squatting in likely nooks, whose shy hare eyes have
worn the same startled gaze these sixty years or
more, renewed with fresh paint from time to time as

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 55

rust requires. Yet the Earth is richer and mankind
happier for the Dutch garden !

And, as though out of compassion for the
Dutchman's difficulties, kind Nature has put into his
hands the bulb, as a means whereby he may attain
the maximum of gaudy colour within the minimum
of space. Given a few square yards of rescued earth
and sufficient manure, and what cannot the neat-
handed, frugal-minded, microscopic-eyed Dutchman
do in the way of concentrated design with his bulbs,
his clipt shrubs, his trim beds, his trickles of water,
and strips of grass and gravel ! And should all other
resources fail he has still his pounded brick-dust,
his yellow sand, his chips of ores and spars and
green glass, which, though they may serve only
remotely to suggest Nature, will at all events carry
your mind off to the gay gardens of precious stones
of fairy-land literature !

Indeed, once embarked upon his style of piquancy-
at-any-price, and it is hard to see where the Dutch
gardener need stop ! In this sophisticated trifling —
this lapidary's mosaic — this pastry-cook's decora-
tion— this child's puzzle of coloured earth, substi-
tuted for coloured living flowers — he pushes Art
farther than the plain Englishman approves. It is,
however, only one step farther than ordinary with him.
All his dealings with Nature are of this abstract sort :
his details are clever, and he is ingenious, if not
imaginative, in his wholes. Still, I repeat, the Earth
is richer, and mankind happier for the Dutch garden.
There is an obvious excuse for its over-fancifulness

56 GARDEN-CRAFT.

in George Meredith's remark that " dullness is always
an irresistible temptation for brilliance." That the
Dutchman should be thus able to compete with
unfriendly Nature, and to reverse the brazen of the
unkind land of his birth, is an achievement that
reflects most creditably upon the artistic capacities
of his nation.

But England —

" This other Eden, demi-paradise "-

suggests a garden of a less-constrained order than
either of these. Not that the English garden is
uniformly of the same type, at the same periods.
The variety of the type is to be accounted for in two
ways : firstly, by the ingrained eclecticism of the
British mind ; secondly, by the changeful character
of the country — this district is flat and open, this is
hilly — so that mere conformity to the lie of the land
would produce gardens which belong now to the
French type, now to the Italian. It is the same
with British Art of all kinds, of all times : in days
long before the Norman visitation and ever since,
the English designer has leant more or less upon
foreign initiative, which goes to prove either how
inert is his own gift of origination, or how devious
may be the tastes of a mixed race.

But if the English garden cannot boast of
singular points of interest, if its art reflects foreign
countries, it bears the mark of the English taste for
landscape, which gives it distinction and is sugges-
tive of very charming effects. The transcendent

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 57

characteristic of the English garden is derived from
and gets its impulse from the prevailing influence
of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of
the country.

It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that
the taste for landscape is wholly of modern growth.
So far as England is concerned it came in, they say,
with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens.
So far as relates to the conscious relish for Nature, so
far as relates to the love of Nature as a mirror of
the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from man, this
assertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the
conscious delight in landscape must have been pre-
ceded by an unconscious sympathy this way : it
could not have sprung without generation. Artistic
sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that
reach one knows not how far back in time, it does
not come by magic.

See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much-
lauded landscape-garden of the " immortal Brown "
was ! Here are two sorts of gardens — the tra-
ditional garden according to Bacon, the garden
according to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first
is Nature in an ideal dress, the second is Nature
with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a
civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy.
The first is a picture painted from a cherished model,
the second is a photograph of the same model
undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the
garden's return to its original barbaric self — the
re-inauguration of the elemental. Let it not be said,

53 GARDEN-CRAFT.

then, that Brown discovered the model, for her fair-
ness was an established fact or she would not have
been so richly apparelled when he lighted upon her.
In other words, the love of the Earth — "that green -
tressed goddess," Coleridge calls her — was no new
thing in Brown's day : the sympathy for the wood-
land world, the love of tree, flower, and grass is
behind the manipulated stiff garden of the fifteenth
and two succeeding centuries, and it is the abiding
source of all enthusiasm in garden-craft.

How long this taste for landscape had existed in
pre-Thomsonian days it does not fall to us to deter-
mine. Suffice it to say that so long as there has
been an English school of gardening this sympathy
for landscape has found expression in the English
garden.* The high thick garden-walls of the old
fighting-days shall have ample outlooks in the shape
of " mounts," from whence views may be had of the
open country. The ornamental value of forest trees
is well-known and appreciated. Even in the thir-
teenth century the English gardener is on the alert
for new specimens and " trees of curiosity," and he is
a master of horticulture. In Chaucer's day he revels
in the green-sward,

" Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete."

* " English scenery of that special type which we call homely, and
of which we are proud as only to be found in England, is, indeed, the
production of many centuries of that conservatism which has spared
the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the future
which has made men delight to spend their money in imprinting on
the face of Nature their own taste in trees and shrubs." (" Vert and
Venery," by Viscoun Lymington ; Nineteenth Century, January,
1891.)

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 59

And the early ballads as I have already shown are
full of allusion to scenery and woodland. In the
days of fine gardens the Englishman must still have
his four acres " to the green," his adjuncts of shrub-
bery, wilderness, and park. Nay, Henry VIII.'s
garden at Nonsuch, had its wilderness of ten acres.
" Chaucer opens his Clerke's Tale with a bit of land-
scape admirable for its large style," says Mr.
Lowell, "and as well composed as any Claude"
("My -Study Windows," p. 22). "What an airy
precision of touch is here, and what a sure eye for
the points of character in landscape." So, too, can
Milton rejoice in

" Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,"

and Herrick :

" Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers."

Nor is this taste for landscape surprising in a country
where the natural scenery is so fair and full of mean-
ing. There are the solemn woods, the noble trees of
forest and park : the "fresh green lap" of the land,
so vividly green that the American Hawthorne
declares he found " a kind of lustre in it." There
is the rich vegetation, and " in France, and still
less in Italy," Walpole reminds us, " they could
with difficulty attain that verdure which the humidity
of our climate bestows." There are the leafy forest
ways gemmed with flowers; the vast hunting-grounds
of old kings, the woodland net of hazel coppice, the
hills and dales, sunned or shaded, the plains mapped

60 GARDEN-CRAFT.

out with hedgerows and enlivened with the glitter of
running water : the heather-clad moors, the golden
gorse covers, the rolling downs dotted over with
thorns and yews and chalk cliffs, the upland hamlets
with their rosy orchards, the farm homesteads nest-
ling in green combes, the grace of standing corn, the
girdle of sea with its yellow shore or white, red, or
grey rocks, its wolds and tracts of rough uncultivated
ground, with bluffs and bushes and wind-harassed
trees — Nature's own " antickes " —driven like green
flames, and carved into grotesque shapes by the
biting gales. There are the

" Russet lawns, and fallows grey
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest,
Meadows prim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide "-

the land that Richard Jefferies says " wants no
gardening, it cannot be gardened ; the least inter-
ference kills it" — English woodland whose beauty is
in its detail. There is nothing empty and unclothed
here. Says Jefferies, " If the clods are left a little
while undisturbed in the fields, weeds spring up and
wild flowers bloom upon them. Is the hedge cut
and trimmed, lo ! the bluebells flower the more, and
a yet fresher green buds forth upon the twigs."
" Never was there a garden like the meadow,"
cries this laureate of the open fields ; " there is not
an inch of the meadow in early summer without a
flower."

And if the various parts and details of an English

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 61

landscape are so beautiful in themselves, what shall
we say of the scenery when Nature, turned artist,
sweeps across it the translucent tints of dawn or
sunset, or wind and cloud-fantasy ; or veil of purple
mist, or grey or red haze, or drift of rain-shower
thrown athwart the hills, for the sunbeams to try
their edge upon ; or any of the numberless atmos-
pheric changes, pure and tender, stern and imperious,
that our humid climate has ever ready to hand !

Shut in, as we in England are, with our short
breadths of view (" on a scale to embrace," remarks
George Meredith), folded, as it were, in a field-
sanctuary of Nature-life — girt about with scenery
that is at once fair, compact, sweetly familiar and
companionable, yet so changefully coloured, so full
of surprises as the day jogs along to its evensong as
to hold observation on the stretch, to force attention
to Nature's last word, to fill the fallow-mind of
lonely country folk with gentle wonder, and swell
the " harvest of a quiet eye," is it strange that a
land like ours should have bred an unrivalled school
of Nature-readers among gardeners, painters, and
poets? "As regards grandeur," says Hawthorne,
" there are loftier scenes in many countries than
the best that England can show ; but, for the pictur-
esqueness of the smallest object that lies under its
gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like
it anywhere." ("Our Old Home," p. 78.)

The real world of England, then, is, in the
Englishman's opinion, itself so fair "it wants no
gardening." Our school of gardeners seem to have

62 GARDEN-CRAFT.

found this out; for the task of the gardener has been
rather that of translator than of creator ; he has not
had to labour at an artificial world he himself had
made, but only to adorn, to interpret the world as it
is, in all its blithe freedom. " The earth is the
garden of Nature, and each fruitful country a Para-
dise ; " and in England, " the world's best garden,"
man has only had to focus the view and frame it.
Flowers, odours, dews, glistening waters, soft airs
and sounds, noble trees, woodland solitudes, moon-
light bowers, have been always with us.

It might seem ungenerous to institute a com-
parison between the French and English styles of
gardening, and to put things in a light unfavourable
to the foreigner, had not the task been already done
for us by a Frenchman in a most out-spoken manner.
Speaking of the French gardens, Diderot, in his
Encyclopaedia (Jardin) says : " We bring to bear
upon the most beautiful situations a ridiculous and
paltry taste. The long straight alleys appear to
us insipid ; the palisades cold and formless. We
delight in devising twisted alleys, scroll-work par-
terres, and shrubs formed into tufts ; the largest
lots are divided into little lots. It is not so with a
neighbouring nation, amongst whom gardens in good
taste are as common as magnificent palaces are rare.
In England, these kinds of walks, practicable in all
weathers, seem made to be the sanctuary of a sweet
and placid pleasure ; the body is there relaxed, the
mind diverted, the eyes are enchanted by the verdure
of the turf and the bowling-greens ; the variety of

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 63

flowers offers pleasant flattery to the smell and sight,
Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up,
there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. How
the fountains beget the shrubs and beautify them !
How the shadows of the woods put the streams
to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry !
but it is well that one French writer (and he
so distinguished) should be found to depict an
English garden, when architects like Jussieu and
Antoine Richard signally failed to reproduce the
thing, to order, upon French soil ! And the Petit
Trianon was in itself an improvement upon, or
rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of
the Orangerie, the basins of Latona and of Neptune,
and the superb tapis vert, with its bordering groves
of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur
Young's unflattering description of the Queen's
Jar din Anglois at Trianon: " It contains about 100
acres, disposed in the taste of what we read of in
books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed
the English style was taken. There is more of
Sir William Chambers here than of Mr. Brown,*
more effort than Nature, and more expence than
taste. It is not easy to conceive anything that Art
can introduce in a garden that is not here ; woods,
rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades, grottoes,

* Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's
"Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr.
Brown here referred to is " Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to
the Edinburgh Magazine, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other
than Mr. "Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed
father of the English garden !

64 GARDEN-CRAFT.

walks, temples, and even villages." Truly a Jardin
Anglpis !

We may well prefer Diderot's simile for the
English garden as "the sanctuary of a sweet and
placid pleasure " to the bustling crowd . of miscel-
laneous elements that took its name in vain in the
Petit Trianon !

For an English garden is at once stately and
homely — homely before all things. Like all works of
Art it is conventionally treated, and its design con-
scious and deliberate. But the convention is broad,
dignified, quiet, homogeneous, suiting alike the charac-
teristics of the country and of the people for whom it
is made. Compared with this, the foreign garden
must be allowed to be richer in provocation ; there is
distinctly more fancy in its conceits, and its style is
more absolute and circumspect than the English.
And yet, just as Browning says of imperfection, that
it may sometimes mean " perfection hid," so, here
our deficiencies may not mean defects.

In order that we may compare the English and
foreign garden we must place them on common
ground ; and I will liken each to a pastoral romance.
Nature is idealised, treated fancifully in each, yet
how different the quality of the contents, the method
of presentment, the style, the technique of this and
that, even when the design is contemporaneous !

A garden is, I say, a sort of pastoral romance,
woven upon a background of natural scenery. In
the exercise of his pictorial genius, both the foreign
and English artist shall run upon natural things, and

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transcribe Nature imaginatively yet realisably ; each
composition shall have a pastoral air, and be rustic
after its fashion. But how different the platform,
how different the mental complexion, the technique
of the artists ! How different the detail and the
atmosphere of the garden. The rusticity of the
foreign garden is dished up in a more delectable
form than is the case in the English, but there is
not the same open-air feeling about this as about
that ; it does not convey the same sense of unex-
hausted possibilities — not the same tokens of living
enjoyment of Nature, of heart-to-heart fellowship
with her. The foreign garden is over-wrought, too
full : it is a passionless thing — like the gaudy birds
of India, finely plumed but songless ; like the prize
rose, without sweetness.

Of the garden of Italy, who shall dare to speak
critically. Child of tradition : heir by unbroken de-
scent, inheritor of the garden-craft of the whole
civilised world. It stands on a pinnacle high above
the others, peerless and alone : fit for the loveliest of
lands —

" Woman-country, wooed not wed,

Loved all the more by Earth's male-lands,

Laid to their hearts instead " —

and it may yet be seen upon its splendid scale,
splendidly adorned, with straight terraces, marble
statues, clipped ilex and box, walks bordered with
azalea and camellia, surrounded with groves of pines
and cypresses — so frankly artistic, yet so subtly
blending itself into the natural surroundings — into

66 GARDEN-CRAFT.

the distant plain, the fringe of purple hills, the
gorgeous panorama of the Alps with its background
of glowing sky. With such a radiant country to
conjure with, we may truly say " The richly provided,
richly require."

If we may speak our mind of the French and
Dutch gardens, they in no wise satisfy English taste
as regards their relation to Nature. Diderot has
said that it is the peculiarity of the French to judge
everything with the mind. It is from this stand-
point that the Frenchman treats Nature in a garden.
He is ever seeking to unite the accessory portions
with the ensemble. He overdoes design. He gives
you the impression that he is far more in love with
his own ideas about Nature than with Nature herself;
that he uses her resources not to interpret them or
perfect them along their own lines, but express his
own interesting ideas. He must provide stimulus
for his imagination ; his nature demands food for
reverie, point for ecstasy, for delicious self-abandon-
ment, for bedazzlement with ideal beauty, and the
garden shall supply him with these whatever the
cost to the materials employed. Hence a certain
unscrupulousness towards Nature in the French
garden ; hence the daring picturesqueness, its leger-
demain. Nature edited thus, is to the Englishman
but Nature in effigy, Nature used as a peg for
fantastical attire, Nature with a false lustre that
tells of lead alloy — Nature that has forgotten what
she is like.

In an English garden, as Diderot notes, Nature

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 67

is handled with more reverence, her rights are more
respected. I am willing to allow that something of
the reserve traceable in English art is begotten of the
phlegmatic temper of the race that rarely gets be-
yond a quiescent fervour ; and this temper, exhibited
in a garden would incline us always to let well alone
and not press things too hard. If the qualities of an
English garden that I speak of are to be attributed
to this temper, then, to judge by results, laissez faire
is not a bad motto for the gardener ! Certain it is
that the dominance of man is more hinted at here
than proclaimed. Compared with foreign examples
we sooner read through its quaintnesses and bra-
veries their sweet originals in Nature : nay, even
when we have idealised things to our hearts' full
bent, they shall yet retain the very note and rhythm
of the woodland world from whence they sprang —
" English in all, of genius blithely free." *

And this is true even in that extreme case, the
Jacobean garden, where we have much the same
quips and cranks, the same quaint power of metrical
changes and playful fancy of the poetry of Herbert,
Vaughan, Herrick, and Donne ; even the little clean-
cut pedantries of this artfullest of all phases of
English garden-craft make for a kind of bland state-
liness and high-flown serenity, that bases its appeal
upon placid beauty rather than upon mere ingenuity
or specious extravagance. The conventionalities of
its borders, its terraces and steps and images in lead
or marble, its ornamental water, its trim geometrical

* Lowell's " Ode to Fielding."

F 2

68 GARDEN-CRAFT.

patterns, its quincunx, clipped hedges, high hedges,
and architectural adornments shall be balanced by
great sweeps of lawn and noble trees that are not
constrained to take hands, as in France, across the
road and to look proper, but are left to grow large
and thick and wide and free. True that there is
about the Jacobean garden an air of scholarliness and
courtliness ; a flavour of dreamland, Arcadia, and
Italy — a touch of the archaic and classical — yet the
thing is saved from utter affectation by our English
out-of-door life which has bred in us an innate love
of the unconstrained, a sympathy that keeps its hold
on reality, and these give an undefinable quality of
freshness to the composition as a whole.*

To sum up. The main difference in the char-
acter of the English and the foreign schools of
gardening lies in this, that the design of the foreign
leans ever in the direction of artificiality, that of
England towards natural freedom. And a true
garden should have an equal regard for Nature and
Art ; it should represent a marriage of contraries,
should combine finesse and audacity, subtilty and
simplicity, the regular and the unexpected, the ideal
and the real "bound fast in one with golden ease."
In a French or Dutch garden the "yes "and "no"

* "Mr. Evelyn has a pleasant villa at Deptford" writes Gibson, "a
fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one, which he
writes of in his " Sylva") . .In his garden he has four large round
philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a
fashion now much used. Part of his garden is very woody and shady
for walking; but his garden not being walled, has little of the best
fruits."

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 69

of Art and Nature are always unequally yoked.
Nature is treated with sparse courtesy by Art, its
individuality is ignored, it sweats like a drudge under
its load of false sentiment. " Sike fancies weren
foolerie."

But in England, though we hold Nature in duress,
we leave her unbound ; if we mew her up for
cultivation, we leave her inviolate, with a chance
of vagrant liberty and a way of escape. Thus,
you will note how the English garden stops, as
it were, without ending. Around or near the house
will be the ordered garden with terraces and
architectural accessories, all trim and fit and nice.
Then comes the smooth-shaven lawn, studded and
belted round with fine trees, arranged as it seems
with a divine carelessness ; and beyond the lawn, the
ferny heather-turf of the park, where the dappled
deer browse and the rabbits run wild, and the sun-
chequered glades go out to meet, and lose themselves
" by green degrees" in the approaching woodland,
—past the river glen, the steep fields of grass and
corn, the cottages and stackyards and grey church
tower of the village ; past the ridge of fir-land and
the dark sweep of heath-country into the dim waving
lines of blue distance.

So that however self-contained, however self-
centred the stiff old garden may seem to be, it never
loses touch with the picturesque commonplaces of
our land ; never loses sympathy with the green
world at large, but, in a sense, embraces and locks in
its arms the whole country-side as far as eye can see.

CHAPTER IV.

HISTORICAL SKETCH CONTINUED.

THE STIFF GARDEN.
"All is fine that is fit."

THE English garden, as I have just tried to
sketch it, was not born yesterday, the bombastic
child of a landscape-gardener's recipe. It epitomises
a nation's instincts in garden-craft ; it is the slow
result of old affection for, old wonder at, beauty in
forms, colours, tones ; old enthusiasm for green turf,
wild flower, and forest tree. Take it at its best,
it records the matured taste of a people of Nature-
readers, Nature-lovers : it is that which experience
has proved to be in most accord with the character
and climate of the country, and the genius of the race.
Landscape has been from the first the central
tradition of English art. Life spent amidst pictorial
scenery like ours that is striking in itself and rendered
more impressive and animated by the rapid atmos-
pheric changes, the shifting lights and shadows, the
life and movement in the sky, and the vivid intense
colouring of our moist climate, has given our tastes
a decided bent this way, and fashioned our Arts of
Poetry, Painting, and Gardening. Out-of-door life

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE.

among such scenery puts our senses on the alert,
and the impressions of natural phenomena supplies
our device with all its images.

The English people had not to wait till the
eighteenth century to know to what they were in-
clined, or what would suit their country's adornment.
From first to last, we have said, the English garden
deals much with trees and shrubs and grass. The
thought of them, and the artistic opportunities they
offer, is present in the minds of accomplished garden-
masters, travelled men, initiated spirits, like Sir
Thomas More, Bacon, Shaftesbury, Temple, and
Evelyn, whose aim is to give garden-craft all the
method and distinctness of which it is capable.
However saturated with aristocratic ideas the cour-
tier-gardener may be, however learned in the cir-
cumspect style of the Italian, he retains his native
relish for the woodland world and babbles of
green fields. A sixteenth-century English gardener
(Gerarde) adjured his countrymen to "Go for-
warde in the name of God, grafife, set, plant, and
nourishe up trees in every corner of your grounde."
A seventeenth-century gardener (Evelyn) had orna-
mental landscape and shady woods in his garden as
well as pretty beds of choice flowers.

" There are, besides the temper of our climate,"
writes another seventeenth-century garden-worthy
(Temple), "two things particular to us, that con-
tribute to the beauty and elegance of our gar-
dens, which are the gravel of our walks and the
fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf;

72 GARDEN-CRAFT.

the first is not known anywhere else, which leaves
all their dry walks in other countries very unpleasant
and uneasy ; the other cannot be found in France or
in Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that
fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that green-
ness in France during most of the summer." And
following upon this is a long essay upon the orna-
mental disposition of the grounds in an English
garden and the culture of fruit trees. " I will not
enter upon any account of flowers," he says, " having
only pleased myself with the care, which is more
the ladies' part than the men's,* but the success is
wholly in the gardener."

And Bacon is not so wholly enamoured of Arca-
dia and with the embodiment of far-brought fancies
in his " prince-like " garden as to be callous of

* This remark of Temple's as to the small importance the flower-beds
had in the mind of the gardener of his day, is significant : as indicating
the different methods employed by the ancient and modern gardener.
It was not that he was not "pleased with the care" of flowers,
but that these were not his chiefest care ; his prime idea was to get
broad, massive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence
the monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-dis-
posed ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter-
poise, the varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven,
as it were, into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used
much as the jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so
unjust to the modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring
over-much for flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may
fairly say it has no monumental style, no ordered shape other than its
carefully-schemed disorder. It is not a masculine affair, but effemi-
nate and niggling ; a little park-scenery, curved shrubberies, wriggling
paths, emphasised specimen plants, and flower-beds of more or less
inane shape tumbled down on the skirts of the lawn or drive, that do
more harm than good to the effect of the place, seen near or at
a distance. How true it is that to believe in Art one must be an
artist !

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 73

Nature's share therein. " The contents ought not
well to be under thirty acres of ground, and to be
divided into three parts ; a green in the entrance, a
heath or desert in the going forth, and the main
garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides ;
and I like well that four acres be assigned to the
Green, six to the Heath, four and four to either
side, and twelve to the main Garden. The Green
hath two pleasures : the one, because nothing is
more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely
shorn ; the other, because it will give you a fair
alley in the midst, by which you may go in front
upon a stately hedge, which is to enclose the garden."
" For the heath, which was the third part of our plot,
I wished it be framed as much as may be to a
natural wildness," &c. Of which more anon.*

Whether, the garden of Bacon's essay is the por-
trait of an actual thing, whether the writer — to use a
phrase of Wordsworth — "had his eye upon the
subject," or whether it was built in the man's brain
like Tennyson's " Palace of Art," we cannot tell.
From the singular air of experience that animates
the description, the sure touch of the writer, we may
infer that Gorhambury had some such garden, the
fruit of its master's " Leisure with honour," or
" Leisure without honour," as the case may be. But
what seems certain is, that the essay is only a sign
of the ordinary English gentleman's mind on the
subject at that time ; and in giving us this master-
piece, Bacon had no more notion of posing as the

* Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.

74 GARDEN-CRAFT.

founder of the English garden (pace Brown) than of
getting himself labelled as the founder of Modern
Science for his distinguished labours in that line.
" I only sound the clarion/' he says, "but I enter
not into the battle."

Moderns are pleased to smile at what they deem
the over-subtilty of Bacon's ideal garden. For my
own part, I find nothing recommended there that a
" princely garden " should not fitly contain (especially
as these things are all of a-piece with the device of the
period), even to those imagination-stirring features
which one thinks he may have described, not from
the life, but from the figures in " The Dream of
Poliphilus" (a book of woodcuts published in Venice,
1499), features of the Enchanted Island, to wit the
two fountains — the first to spout water, to be
adorned with ornaments of images, gilt or of marble ;
the " other, which we may call a bathing-pool that
admits of much curiosity and beauty wherewith we
will not trouble ourselves ; as that the bottom be
finely paved with images, the sides likewise ; and
withal embellished with coloured glass, and such
things of lustre ; encompassed also with fine rails of
low statues."

No artist is disposed to apologise for the presence
of subtilty in Art, nor I for the subtle device of
Bacon's garden. All Art is cunning. Yet we must
not simply note the deep intent of the old master,
but must equally recognise the air of gravity that
pervades his recommendations — the sweet reason-
* Nineteenth Century Magazine ^ July, 1890.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 75

ableness of suggestions for design that have as
much regard for the veracities of Nature, and the
dictates of common-sense, as for the nice elegan-
cies and well-calculated audacities of consummate
Art.

" I only sound the clarion, but I enter not into
the battle." Even so, Master ! we will hold thy hand
as far as thou wilt go ; and the clarion thou soundest
right well, and most serviceably for all future gar-
deners !

I like the ring of stout challenge in the opening
words, which command respect for the subject, and,
if rightly construed, should make the heretic " land-
scape gardener," — who dotes on meagre country-
grass and gipsy scenery — pause in his denunciation
of Art in a garden. " God Almighty first planted a
Garden ; and indeed it is the purest of humane
pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the
Spirits of man, without which Buildings and Palaces
are but gross Handyworks. And a man shall ever
see, that when ages grow to Civility and Elegancy,
men come to build stately sooner than to garden
finely : as if Gardening were the Greater Per-
fection."

This first paragraph has, for me, something of
the stately tramp and pregnant meaning of the
opening phrase of "At a Solemn Music." The praise
of gardening can no further go. To say more were
impossible. To say less, were to belittle your sub-
ject. I think of Ben Jonson's simile, " They jump
farthest who fetch their race largest." For Bacon

;6 GARDEN-CRAFT.

" fetches" his subject back to " In the beginning,"
and prophesies of all time. Thus does he lift his
theme to its full height at starting, and the remainder
holds to the same heroic measure.

If the ideal garden be fanciful, it is also grand and
impressive. Nor could it well be otherwise. For
when the essay was written fine gardening was in
the air, and the master had special opportunities for
studying and enjoying great gardens. More than
this, Bacon was an apt craftsman in many fields, a
born artist, gifted with an imagination at once rich
and curious, whose performances of every sort de-
clare the student's love of form, and the artist's nice
discrimination of expression. Then, too, his mind
was set upon the conquest of Nature, of which gar-
dening is a province, for the service of man, for
physical enjoyment, and for the increase of social
comfort. Yet was he an Englishman first, and a fine
gardener afterwards. Admit the author's sense of
the delights of art-magic in a garden, none esteemed
them more, yet own the discreet economy of his
imaginative strokes, the homely bluntness of his
criticisms upon foreign vagaries, the English sane-
mindedness of his points, his feeling for broad effects
and dislike of niggling, the mingled shrewdness and
benignity of his way of putting things. It is just
because Bacon thus treats of idealisms as though
they were realisms, because he so skilfully wraps
up his fanciful figures in matter-of-fact language that
even the ordinary English reader appreciates the
art of Bacon's stiff garden, and entertains art-aspira-
tions unawares.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 77

Every reader of Bacon will recognise what I wish
to point out. Here, however, are a few examples :—

11 For the ordering of the Ground within the Great
Hedge, I leave it to a Variety of Device. Advising,
nevertheless, that whatsoever form you cast it into ;
first it be not too busie, or full of work ; wherein I,
for my part, do not like Images cut out in Juniper, or
other garden stuffs ; they are for Children. Little low
Hedges, round like Welts, with some pretty Pyra-
mids, I like well ; and in some places Fair Columns
upon Frames of Carpenters' work. I would also
have the Alleys spacious and fair."

"As for the making of Knots or Figures, with
Divers Coloured earths, that they may lie under the
windows of the House, on that side which the Gar-
den stands, they be but Toys, you may see as good
sights many times in Tarts."

" For Fountains, they are a Great Beauty and
Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden
unwholesome and full of flies and frogs "

" For fine Devices, of arching water without spil-
ling, and making it rise in several forms (of Feathers,
Drinking Glasses, Canopies, and the like) (see
" The Dream of Poliphilus") they be pretty things to
look on, but nothing to Health and Sweetness."

Thus throughout the Essay, with alternate rise
and fall, do fancy and judgment deliver themselves of
charge and retort, making a kind of logical see-saw.
At the onset Fancy kicks the beam ; at the middle,
Judgement is in the ascendant, and before the sentence
is done the balance rides easy. And this scrupulous-

78 GARDEN-CRAFT.

ness is not to be wholly ascribed to the fastidious
bent of a mind that lived in a labyrinth ; it speaks
equally of the fineness of the man's ideal, which
lifts his standard sky-high and keeps him watchful
to a fault in attaining desired effects without run-
ning upon " trifles and jingles." The master-text of
the whole Essay seems to be the writer's own apo-
thegm : "Nature is commanded by obeying her."

That a true gardener should love Nature goes
without saying. And Bacon loved Nature passion-
ately, and gardens only too well. He tells us
these were his favourite sins in the strange document
— half prayer, half Apologia — written after he had
made his will, at the time of his fall, when he pre-
sumably concluded that anything might happen.
" Thy creatures have been my books, but Thy Scrip-
tures much more. I have sought Thee in the courts,
fields, and gardens, but I have found Thee in Thy
temples."

Three more points about the essay I would like
to comment upon. First, That in spite of its lofty
dreaming, it treats of the hard and dry side of gar-
dening as a science in so methodical a manner that
but for what it contains besides, and for its mint-
mark of a great spirit, the thing might pass as an
extract from a more- than- ordinary practical gardener's
manual. Bacon does not write upon the subject like
a man in another planet, but like a man in a land of
living men.

Secondly, As to the attitude of Bacon and his
school towards external Nature. In them is no trace

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 79

of the mawkish sentimentality of the modern " land-
scape-gardener/' proud of his discoveries, bustling
to show how condescending he can be towards
Nature, how susceptible to a pastoral melancholy.
There is nothing here of the maundering of Shenstone
over his ideal landscape-garden that reads as though
it would be a superior sort of pedants' Cremorne,
where " the lover's walk may have assignation seats,
with proper mottoes, urns to faithful lovers, trophies,
garlands, etc., by means of Art " ; and where due
consideration is to be given to " certain complexions
of soul that will prefer an orange tree or a myrtle to
an oak or cedar." The older men thought first of
the effects that they wished to attain, and proceeded
to realise them without more ado. They had no
" codes of taste " to appeal to, and no literary law-
givers to stand in dread of. They applied Nature's
raw materials as their art required. And yet, com-
pared with the methods of the heavy-handed realist
of later times such unscrupulousness had a merit of
its own. To suit their purposes the old gardeners
may have defied Nature's ways and wont ; but, even
so, they act as fine gentlemen should : they never
pet and patronise her : they have no blunt and
blundering methods such as mark the Nature-maulers
of the Brown or Batty-Langley school : if they cut,
they do not mince, nor hack, nor tear, they cut clean.
In one's better moments one can almost sympathise
with the " landscape-gardener's " feelings as he
reads, if he ever does read, Evelyn's classic book
tl Sylva ; or, a Discourse of Forest-trees," how they

8o GARDEN-CRAFT.

trimmed the hedges of hornbeam, "than which there
is nothing more graceful," and the cradle or close-walk
with that perplext canopy which lately covered the
seat in his Majesty's garden at Hampton Court, and
how the tonsile hedges, fifteen or twenty feet high, are
to be cut and kept in order " with a scythe of four feet
long, and very little falcated ; this is fixed on a long
sneed or straight handle, and does wonderfully expedite
the trimming of these and the like hedges"

Thirdly, Bacon's essay tells us all that an
English garden can be, or may be. Bacon writes not
for his age alone but for all time ; nay, his essay
covers so much ground that the legion of after-
writers have only to pick up the crumbs that fall
from this rich man's table, and to amplify the two
hundred and sixty lines of condensed wisdom that it
contains. -Its category of effects reaches even the
free-and-easy planting of the skirts of our dressed
grounds, with flowers and shrubs set in the turf
" framed as much as may be to a natural wildness " —
a pretty trick of compromise which the modern book-
writers would have us believe they invented them-
selves.

On one point the modern garden has the ad-
vantage and is bound to excel the old, namely in
its employment of foreign trees and shrubs. The
decorative use of " trees of curiosity," as the foreign
trees were then called, and the employment of
variegated foliage, was not unknown to the gardener
of early days, but it was long before foreign plants
were introduced to any great extent. Loudon has

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 81

taken the trouble to reckon up the number of speci-
mens that came to England century by century, and
we gather from this that the imports of modern times
exceed those of earlier times to an enormous extent.
Thus, he computes that only 131 new specimens of
foreign trees were introduced into England in the
seventeenth century as against 445 in the following
century.

Yet, to follow up this interesting point, we may
observe that Heutzner, writing of English gardens in
1598, specially notes " the great variety of trees and
plants at Theobalds."

Furthermore, to judge by Worlidge's "Systema
Horticulturae " (1677) ^ would seem that the practice
of variegating, and of combining the variegated
foliage of plants and shrubs, was in existence at that
time.

" Dr. Uvedale, of Enfield, is a great lover of
plants," says Gibson, writing in 1691, " and is
become master of the greatest and choicest collection
of exotic greens that is perhaps anywhere in this
land. . . . His flowers are choice, his stock
numerous, and his culture of them very methodical
and curious ; but to speak of the garden in the
whole, it does not lie fine to please the eye, his
delight and care lying more in the ordering particular
plants, than in the pleasing view and form of his
garden."

" Darby, at Hoxton, has but a little garden, but is

master of several curious greens His

Fritalaria Crassa (a green) had a flower on it of the

82 GARDEN-CRAFT.

breadth of half-a-crown, like an embroidered star of

many colours He raises many striped

hollies by inoculation," &c. (" Gleanings in Old
Garden Literature," Hazlitt, p. 240.)

And yet one last observation I would like to
make, remembering Bacon's subtilty, and how his
every utterance is the sum of matured analytical
thought. This yearning for wild nature that makes
itself felt all through the Essay, this scheme for a
" natural wildness " touching the hem of artificiality;
this provision for mounts of some pretty height
" to look abroad in the fields " ; this care for the
" Heath or Desart in the going forth, planted not in
any order ; " the " little Heaps in the Nature of
Molehills (such as are in wild Heaths) to be set with
pleasant herbs, wild thyme, pinks, periwinkle, and
the like Low Flowers being withall sweet and sightly"
— what does it imply ? Primarily, it declares the
artist who knows the value of contrast, the interest
of blended contraries ; it is the cultured man's
hankering after a many-faced Nature readily acces-
sible to him in his many moods ; it tells, too, of the
drift of the Englishman towards familiar landscape
effects, the garden-mimicry which sets towards
pastoral Nature ; but above and beyond all else, it is
a true Baconian stroke. Is not the man's innermost
self here revealed, who in his eagerest moments
struggled for detachment of mind, held his will in
leash according to- his own astute maxim "not to
engage oneself too peremptorily in anything, but
ever to have either a window open to fly out of, or a

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 83

secret way to retire by " ? In a sense, the garden's
technique illustrates its author's personality. To
change Montaigne's reply to the king who admired
his essays, Bacon might say, " I am my garden."

Many references to old garden-craft might be
given culled from the writings of Sir Thomas More,
John Lyly, Gawen Douglas, John Gerarde, Sir
Philip Sidney, and others; all of whom are quoted in
Mr. Sieveking's charming volume, " The Praise of
Gardens." But none will serve our purpose so well
as the notes of Heutzner, the German traveller,
who visited England in the i6th century, and Sir
William Temple's description of the garden of Moor
Park. According to Heutzner, the gardens at
Theobalds, Nonsuch, Whitehall, Hampton Court,
and Oxford were laid out with considerable taste and
extensively ornamented with architectural and other
devices. The Palace at Nonsuch is encompassed
with parks full of deer, with delicious gardens,
groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of
verdure, and walks enclosed with trees. " In the
pleasure and artificial gardens are many columns and
pyramids of marble, two fountains that spout water
one round the other like a pyramid, upon which are
perched small birds that stream water out of their
bills. In the grove of Diana is a very agreeable
fountain, with Actaeon turned into a stag, as he was
sprinkled by the goddess and her nymphs, with
inscriptions." Theobalds, according to Heutzner's
account, has a "great variety of trees and plants,"
labyrinths, fountains of white marble, a summer-

G 2

84 GARDEN-CRAFT.

house, and statuary. The gardens had their terraces,
trellis-walks, and bowling-greens, the beds being laid
out in geometrical lines, and the hedges formed of
yews, hollies, and limes, clipped and shaped into
cones, pyramids, and other devices. Among the
delights of Nonsuch was a wilderness of ten acres
of extent. Of Hampton. Court, he says : "We saw
rosemary so planted and nailed to the walls as to
cover them entirely, which is a method exceeding
common in England."

No book on English gardens can afford to dis-
pense with Temple's description of the garden of
Moor Park, which is given with considerable relish,
as though it satisfied the ideal of the writer.

" The perfectest figure of a Garden I ever saw, either at Home or
Abroad." — " It lies on the side of a Hill (upon which the House stands)?
but not very steep. The length of the House, where the best Rooms
and of most Use or Pleasure are, lies upon the Breadth of the Garden,
the Great Parlour opens into the Middle of a Terras Gravel-Walk that
lies even with it, and which may be, as I remember, about 300 Paces
long, and broad in Proportion, the Border set with Standard Laurels,
and at large Distances, which have the beauty of Orange-Trees, out
of Flower and Fruit : From this Walk are Three Descents by many
Stone Steps, in the Middle and at each End, into a very large Parterre.
This is divided into Quarters by Gravel- Walks, and adorned with Two
Fountains and Eight Statues in the several Quarters ; at the End of
the Terras-Walk are Two Summer-Houses, and the Sides of the Par-
terre are ranged with two large Cloisters, open to the Garden, upon
Arches of Stone, and ending with two other Summer-Houses even
with the Cloisters, which are paved with Stone, and designed for
Walks of Shade, there are none other in the whole Parterre. Over
these two Cloisters are two Terrasses covered with Lead and fenced
with Balusters ; and the Passage into these Airy Walks, is out of the
two Summer-Houses, at the End of the first Terras- Walk. The
Cloister facing the South is covered with Vines, and would have been
proper for an Orange-House, and the other for Myrtles, or other more
common Greens ; and had, I doubt not, been cast for that Purpose, if
this Piece of Gardening had been then in as much Vogue as it is now.

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 85

" From the middle of this Parterre is a Descent by many Steps
flying on each Side of a Grotto, that lies between them (covered with
Lead, and flat) into the lower Garden, which is all Fruit-Trees ranged
about the several Quarters of a Wilderness, which is very Shady ;
the Walks here are all Green, the Grotto embellished with Figures of
Shell-Rock work, Fountains, and Water-works. If the Hill had not
ended with the lower Garden, and the Wall were not bounded by a
Common Way that goes through the Park, they might have added a
Third Quarter of all Greens ; but this Want is supplied by a Garden
on the other Side of the House, which is all of that Sort, very Wild,
Shady, and adorned with rough Rock- work and Fountains." (" Upon
the Garden of Epicurus, or of Gardening.")

The " Systema Horticulturae " of John Worlidge
(1677) was, says Mr. Hazlitt (" Gleanings in old
Garden Literature," p. 40), apparently the earliest
manual for the guidance of gardeners. It deals with
technical matters, such as the treatment and virtue of
different soils, the form of the ground, the structure
of walls and fences, the erection of arbours, summer-
houses, fountains, grottoes, obelisks, dials, &c.

"The Scots Gardener," by John Reid (1683)
follows this, and is, says Mr. Hazlitt, the parent-
production in this class of literature. It is divided
into two portions, of which the first is occupied by
technical instructions for the choice of a site for a
garden, the arrangement of beds and walks, &c.

Crispin de Passe's " Book of Beasts, Birds,
Flowers, Fruits, &c.," published in London (1630),
heralds the changes which set in with the introduc-
tion of the Dutch school of design.

To speak generally of the subject, it is with the
art of Gardening as with Architecture, Literature, and
Music — there is the Mediaeval, the Elizabethan, the
Jacobean, the Georgian types. Each and all are

86 GARDEN-CRAFT.

English, but English with a difference — with a
declared tendency this way or that, which justifies
classification, and illustrates the march of things in
this changeful modern world.

The various types include the mediaeval garden, the
square garden, the knots and figures of Elizabethan
times, with their occasional use of coloured earths
and gravels ; the pleach-work and intricate borders
of James I. ; the painted Dutch statues as at Ham
House ; the quaint canals, the winding gravel-walks,
the formal geometrical figures ; the quincunx and
itoile of William and Mary ; later on, the smooth,
bare, and bald grounds of Kent, the photographic
copyism of Nature by Brown, the garden-farm of
Shenstone, and other phases of the " Landscape
style " which served for the green grave of the old-
fashioned English garden.

In the early years of George III. a reaction
against tradition set in with so strong a current,
that there remains scarcely any private garden in
the United Kingdom which presents in all its parts a
sample of the original design.

Levens, near Kendal, of which I give two illustra-
tions, is probably the least spoiled of any remaining
examples ; and this was, it would seem, planned by
a Frenchman, but worked out under the restraining
influences of English taste. A picture on the stair-
case of the house, apparently Dutch, bears the
inscription, " M. Beaumont, gardener to King James
II. and Colonel James Grahme. He laid out the
gardens at Hampton Court and at Levens." The

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 87

gardener's house at the place is still called " Beaumont
Hall." (See an admirable monograph upon " Col.
James Grahme, of Levens," by Mr. Joscelin Bagot,
Kendal.)

One who is perhaps hardly in sympathy with
the quaintness of the gardens, thus writes : " There
along a wide extent of terraced walks and walls,
eagles of holly and peacocks of yew still find with
each returning summer their wings clipt and their
talons ; there a stately remnant of the old promenoirs
such as the Frenchman taught our fathers,"55" rather I
would say to build than plant — along which in days
of old stalked the gentlemen with periwigs and
swords, the ladies in hoops and furbelows — may still
to this day be seen."

With the pictures of the gardens at Levens before
us, with memories of Arley, of Brympton, of
Wilton, f of Montacute, Rockingham, Penshurst,
Severn End, Berkeley, \ and Haddon, we may
here pause a moment to count up and bewail our

* With regard to this remark, we have to note a certain amount
of French influence throughout the reigns of the Jameses and
Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II. ;" and we
hear also of Andre Mollet, gardener to James I. ; also that Charles II.
borrowed Le Notre to lay out the gardens of Greenwich and St.
James's Park.

f The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and contain
noble trees, among which are a group of fine cedars and an ilex
beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclined when
he wrote his "Arcadia" here. The Italian garden is one of the
most beautiful in England.

t Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the fore-court is
noble, so are the stables ; and, above all, the gardens, which are
incomparable by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty
piscina. The holly-hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of."

GARDEN-CRAFT.

losses. Wolsey's garden at Hampton Court is now
effaced, for the design of the existing grounds dates
from William III. Nonsuch in Surrey, near Epsom
race-course, is a mere memory. In old days this was
a favourite resort of Queen Elizabeth; the garden was
designed by her father, but the greater part carried
out by the last of the Fitzalans. Evelyn, writing of
Nonsuch, says : " There stand in the garden two
handsome stone pyramids and the avenue planted
with rows of fair elms, but the rest of these goodly
trees, both of this and of Worcester Park adjoining,
were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels
in the late war."

Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, had a noble garden ;
it was bought in 1564 by Cecil, and became the
favourite haunt of the Stuarts, but the house was
finally destroyed during the Commonwealth.

My Lord Fauconbergtis garden at Suttun Court
is gone too. As described by Gibson in 1691, it
had many charms. " The maze, or wilderness, there
is very pretty, being set all with greens, with a
cypress arbour in the middle," &c.

Sir Henry Capell's garden at Kew, described by
the same writer, " has as curious greens, and is as
well kept as any about London. . . His orange
trees and other choice greens stand out in summer
in two walks about fourteen feet wide, enclosed with
a timber frame about seven feet high, and set with
silver firs hedge-wise. . . His terrace walk, bare
in the middle and grass on either side, with a hedge
of rue on one side next a low wall, and a row of

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 89

dwarf trees on the other, shews very fine ; and so
do from thence his yew hedges with trees of the
same at equal distance, kept in pretty shapes with
tonsure. His flowers and fruits are of the best, for
the advantage of which two parallel walls, about
fourteen feet high, were now raised and almost
finished," &c.

Sir Stephen Foxs garden at Chiswick, "excels for
a fair gravel walk betwixt two yew hedges, with
rounds and spires of the same, all under smooth
tonsure. At the far end of this garden are two
myrtle hedges that cross the garden. The other
gardens are full of flowers and salleting, and the
walls well clad."

Wimbledon House, which was rebuilt by Sir
Thomas Cecil in 1588, and surveyed by order of
Parliament in 1649, was celebrated for its trees,
gardens, and shrubs. In the several gardens, which
consisted of mazes, wildernesses, knots, alleys, &c.,
are mentioned a great variety of fruit trees and
shrubs, particularly a "faire bay tree," valued at
£i ; and "one very faire tree called the Irish
arbutis, very lovely to look upon and worth
£i los." (Lysons, L, 397.)

The gardens at Sherborne Castle were laid out
by Sir Walter Raleigh. Coker, in his " Survey of
Dorsetshire," written in the time of James I., says
that Sir Walter built in the park adjoining the old
Castle, "a most fine house which hee beautified with
orchardes, gardens, and groves of much varietie
and great delight ; soe that whether that you consider

90 GARDEN-CRAFT.

the pleasantness of the seate, the goodnesse of the
soyle, or the other delicacies belonging unto it, it
rests unparalleled by anie in those partes " (p. 1 24).
This same park, magnificently embellished with
woods and gardens, was "improved" away by
the " landscape-gardener " Brown, who altered the
grounds.

Cobham, near Gravesend, still famous in horti-
cultural annals as Nonsuch is for its apples, was the
seat of the Brookes. The extent to which fruit was
cultivated in old time is seen by the magnitude of
the orangery at Beddington House, Surrey, which
was two hundred feet long ; the trees mostly
measured thirteen feet high, and in 1690 some ten
thousand oranges were gathered.

Ham is described with much gusto by Evelyn :
"After dinner I walked to Ham to see the house
and garden of the Duke of Lauderdale, which is
indeed inferior to few of the best villas in Italy
itself; the house furnished like a great Prince's, the
parterres, flower-gardens, orangeries, groves, aven-
ues, courts, statues, perspectives, fountains, aviaries,
and all this at the banks of the sweetest river in the
world, must needs be admirable."

Bowyer House, Surrey, is described also by
Evelyn as having a very pretty grove of oaks and
hedges of yew in the garden, and a handsome row
of tall elms before the court. This garden has,
however, made way for rows of mean houses.

At Oxford, where you would have expected more
respect for antiquity, the walks and alleys, along

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 91

which Laud had conducted Charles and Henrietta,
the bowling-green at Christ Church of Cranmer's
time — all are gone.

The ruthless clearance of these gardens of
renown is sad to relate : " For what sin has the
plough passed over your pleasant places ? " may be
demanded of numberless cases besides Blakesmoor.
Southey, writing upon this very point, adds that
" feeling is a better thing than taste," — for " taste "
did it at the bidding of critics who had no " feeling,"
and who veered round with the first sign of change
in the public mind about gardening. Not content
with watching the heroic gardens swept away, he
must goad the Vandals on to their sorry work by
flattering them for their good taste. For what Horace
Walpole did to expose the poverty-stricken design
and all the poor bankrupt whimsies of the garden of
his day, we owe him thanks ; but not for including
in his condemnation the noble work of older days.
In touching upon Lord Burleigh's garden, and that
at Nonsuch, he says: "We find the magnificent
though false taste was known here as early as the
reigns of Henry VIII. and his daughter." This is
not bad, coming from the man who built a cockney
Gothic house adorned with piecrust battlements and
lath-and-plaster pinnacles ; who spent much of his
life in concocting a maze of walks in five acres of
ground, and was so far carried away by mock-
rustic sentiment as to have rakes and hay-forks
painted as leaning against the walls of his paddocks !
But then Walpole, in his polished way, sneered at

92 GARDEN-CRAFT.

everybody and everything; he " spelt every man
backward," as Macaulay observes ; with himself he
lived in eminent self-content.

So too, after quoting Temple's description of the
garden at Moor Park with the master's little rhap-
sody— "the sweetest place I think that I have
seen in my life, either before or since, at home or
abroad" — Walpole has this icy sneer: "Any man
might design and build as sweet a garden who
had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn.
It was not peculiar in Sir William Temple to think
in that manner."

It is not wise, however, to lay too much stress
upon criticisms of this sort. After all, any phase of
Art does but express the mind of its day, and it
cannot do duty for the mind of another time. " The
old order changeth, yielding place to new," and to
take a critical attitude towards the forms of an older
day is almost a necessity of the case ; they soon
become curiosities. Yet we may fairly regret the
want of tenderness in dealing with these gardens of
the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, for, by all the
laws of human expression, they should be master-
pieces. The ground-chord of the garden-enterprise
of those days was struck by Bacon, who rates
buildings and palaces, be they never so princely,
as " but gross handiworks " where no garden is :
" Men come to build stately sooner than to
garden finely, as if gardening were the Greater
Perfection " — the truth of which saying is only too
glaringly apparent in the relative conditions of the

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 93

arts of architecture and of gardening in the present
day !

By all the laws of human expression, I say, these
old gardens should be masterpieces. The sixteenth
century, which saw the English garden formulated,
was a time for grand enterprises ; indeed, to this
period is ascribed the making of England. These
gardens, then, are the handiwork of the makers of
England, and should bear the marks of heroes. They
are relics of the men and women who made our land
both fine and famous in the days of the Tudors ;
they represent the mellow fruit of the leisure, the
poetic reverie, the patient craft of men versed in
great affairs — big men, who thought and did big
things — men of splendid genius and stately notions —
past-masters of the art of life who would drink life
to the lees.

As gardeners, these old statesmen were no
dabblers. They had the good fortune to live in a
current of ideas of formal device that touched art at
all points and was well calculated to assist the
creative faculty in design of all kinds. They lived
before the art of bad gardening had been invented ;
before pretty thoughts had palled the taste, before
gardening had learnt routine ; while Nature smiled
a virgin smile and had a sense of unsolved mystery.
More than this, garden-craft was then no mere craze
or passing freak of fashion, but a serious item in the
round of home-life ; — gardening was a thing to be
done as well as it could be done. Design was fresh
and open to individual treatment — men needed an out-

94 GARDEN-CRAFT.

let for their love of, their elation at, the sight of beauti-
ful things, and behind them lay the background of
far-reaching traditions to encourage, inspire, protect
experiment with the friendly shadow of authority.

An accomplished French writer has remarked
that even the modest work of Art may contain
occasion for long processes of analysis. " Very great
laws," he says, " may be illustrated in a very small
compass." And so one thinks it is with the ancient
garden. Looked at as a piece of design, it is the
blossom of English genius at one of its sunniest
moments. It is a bit of the history of our land. It
embodies the characteristics of the mediaeval, the
Elizabethan and Jacobean ages just as faithfully as
do other phases of contemporary art. It contains
the same principle of beauty, the same sense of form,
that animated these ; it has the same curious turns
of expression, the same mixture of pedantry and
subtle sweetness ; the same wistful daring and
humorous sadness ; the same embroidery of nice
fancy — half jocund, half grave, as — shall we say —
Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Spenser's "Faerie
Queene," Milton's "Comus," More's "Utopia," Bacon's
Essays, Purcell's Madrigals, John Thorpe's architec-
ture at Longleat. The same spirit, the same wit and
fancy resides in each ; they differ only in the medium
of expression.

To condemn old English gardening, root and
branch, for its " false taste " (and it was not peculiar
to Walpole to think in that manner), was, in truth,
to indict our nation on a line of device wherein we

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 95

excelled, and to condemn device that represents the
inspired dreams of some of England's elect sons.

To our sorry groundling minds the old pleasaunce
may seem too rich and fantastic, too spectacular, too
much idealised. And if to be English one must
needs be bourgeois, the objection must stand. Here
is developed garden-craft, and development almost
invariably means multiplicity of forms and a marked
departure from primaeval simplicity. Grant, if you
will, that Art is carried too far, and Nature not
carried far enough in the old garden, yet did it
deserve better treatment. Judged both from its
human and its artistic side, the place is as lovable
as it is pathetic. It has the pathos of all art that
survives its creators, the pathos of all abandoned
human idols, of all high human endeavour that is
blown upon. What is more, it holds, as it were, the
spent passion of men of Utopian dreams, the ideal (in
one kind) of the spoiled children of culture, the
knight-errantry of the Renascence — whose imagin-
ation soared after illimitable satisfaction, who were
avowedly bent upon transforming the brazen of
this world into the golden, to whom desire was
but the first step to attainment, and failure an un-
known experience.

But even yet some may demur that the interest
of the antique garden, as we see it, is due to Nature
direct, and not to art-agencies. It is Nature who
gives it its artistic qualities of gradation, contrast,
play of form and colour, the flicker of sunshine
through the foliage, the shadows on the grass — not

96 GARDEN-CRAFT.

the master who begot the thing, for has he not been
dead, and his vacant orbits choked with clay these
two hundred years and more ! To him, of course,
may be ascribed the primal thought of the place, and,
say, some fifty years of active participation in its
ordering and culture, but for the rest — for its poetic
excitement, for its yearly accesses of beauty — are
they not to be credited in full to the lenience of
Time and the generous operations of Nature?

Grant all that should rightly be granted to the
disaffected grumbler, and yet, in Mr. Lowell's words
for another, yet a parallel case, I plead that " Poets
are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we
find in their works ; for these fine creations as truly
build themselves up in the brain as they are built up
with deliberate thought." If a garden owed none of
its characteristics to its maker, if it had not expressed
the mind of its designer, why the essential differences
of the garden of this style and of that ! Properly
speaking, the music of all gardens is framed out of
the same simple gamut of Nature's notes — it is but
one music poured from myriad lips — yet out of the
use of the same raw elements what a variety of tunes
can be made, each tune complete in itself ! And it
is because we may identify the maker in his work ;
because, like the unfinished air, abruptly brought to
a close at the master's death, the place is much as it
was first schemed, one is jealous for the honour of
the man whose eye prophesied its ultimate magic
even as he initiated its plan, and drafted its lines.

Many an English house has been hopelessly

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE. 97

vulgarised and beggared by the banishment of the
old pleasaunces of the days of Elizabeth, or of the
Jameses and Charleses, and their wholesale demo-
lition there and then struck a blow at English
gardening from which it has not yet recovered. It
may be admitted that, in the case of an individual
garden here and there, the violation of these relics
may be condoned on the heathen principle of tit
for tat, because Art had, in the first instance, so to
speak, turned her back on some fair landscape that
Providence had provided upon the site, preferring to
focus man's eye within rather than without the garden's
bounds, therefore the vengeance is merited. Yet,
where change was desirable, it had been better to
modify than to destroy.

" Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough."

Certain it is that along with the girdle of high
hedge or wall has gone that air of inviting mystery
and homely reserve that our forefathers loved, and
which is to me one of the pleasantest traits of an old
English garden, best described as

" A haunt of ancient peace."

H

98

CHAPTER V.
THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN."

" 'Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar

Bold Alteration pleades
Large evidence ; but Nature soon
Her righteous doom areads." — SPENSER.

WHY were the old-fashioned gardens destroyed ?
Firstly, because the traditional garden of the early
part of the eighteenth century, when the reaction
set in, represented a style which had run to seed,
and men were tired of it ; secondly, because the
taste for foreign trees and shrubs, that had
existed for a long time previously, then came
to a head, and it was found that the old type
of garden was not fitted for the display of the
augmented stock of foreign material. Here was a
new element in garden-craft, a new chance of decora-
tion in the way of local colours in planting, which
required a new adjustment of garden-effects ; and as
there was some difficulty in accommodating the new
and the old, the problem was met by the abolition of
the old altogether.

As to this matter of the sudden increase of speci-
men plants, Loudon remarks that in the earlier
century the taste for foreign plants was confined to

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 99

a few, and they not wealthy persons ; but in the
eighteenth century the taste for planting foreign
trees extended itself among rich landed proprie-
tors. A host of amateurs, botanists, and commercial
gardeners were busily engaged in enriching the
British Arboretum, and the garden-grounds had to
be arranged for new effects and a new mode of
culture. In Loudon's " Arboretum " (p. 126) is a list
of the species of foreign trees and shrubs introduced
into England up to the year 1830. He calculates
that the total number of specimens up to the time
that he wrote was about 1,400, but the numbers
taken by centuries are : in the sixteenth century,
89; in the seventeenth century, 131; in the eigh-
teenth century, 445 ; and in the first three decades
of the nineteenth century, 699 !

Men stubbed up the old gardens because they
had grown tired of their familiar types, as they tire
of other familiar things. The eighteenth century
was essentially a critical age, an age of enquiry, and
gardening, along with art, morals, and religion, came
in for its share of coffee-house discussion, and elabor-
ate es say- wri ting, and nothing was considered satis-
factory. As to gardening, it was not natural enough
for the critics. The works of Salvator and Poussin
had pictured the grand and terrible in scenery,
Thomson was writing naturalistic poetry, Rousseau
naturalistic prose. Garden-ornament was too clas-
sical and formal for the varnished litterateur of the
Spectator and the Guardian — too symmetrical for the
jingling rhymester of a sing-song generation — too

H 2

ioo GARDEN-CRAFT.

artificial for the essayist " 'Pealing from Jove to
Nature's bar/' albeit he is privately content to go on
touching up his groves and grottoes at Twickenham,
securing the services of a peer

" To form his quincunx, and to rank his vines."

Gardens are looked upon as so much " copy " to
the essayist. What affected tastes have these critics !
What a confession of counterfeit love, of selfish
literary interest in gardens is this of Addison's :
" I think there are as many kinds of gardening as of
poetry. Your makers of parterres and flower-gar-
dens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art ;
contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cas-
cades, are romance writers." How beside nature,
beside garden-craft, are such pen-man's whimsies !
" Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," Bacon
would say.

Walpole's essay on gardening is entertaining
reading, and his book gives us glimpses of the
country-seats of all the great ladies and gentlemen
who had the good fortune to be his acquaintances.
His condemnation of the geometrical style of garden-
ing common in his day, though quieter in tone than
Pope's, was none the less effective in promoting a
change of style. He tells how in Kip's views of the
seats of our nobility we have the same "tiring and
returning uniformity." Every house is approached
by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a
gravel-walk and two grass plats or borders of
flowers. " Each rises above the other by two or three

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN" 101

steps, and as many walks and terrasses ; and so
many iron gates, that we recollect those ancient
romances in which every entrance was guarded by
nymphs or dragons. At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown,
in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married,
a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each, I sup-
pose, not a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of
correspondent gates ; and before you arrived at these,
you passed a narrow gut between two terrasses that
rose above your head, and which were crowned by a
line of pyramidal yews. A bowling-green was all
the lawn admitted in those times, a circular lake the
extent of magnificence."

Such an air of truth and soberness pervades Wai-
pole's narrative, and to so absurd an extent has for-
mality been manifestly carried under the auspices of
Loudon and Wise, who had stocked our gardens with
" giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms, mottoes in
yew, box, and holly," that we are almost persuaded
to be Vandals. " The compass and square, were of
more use in plantations than the nursery-man. The
measured walk, the quincunx, and the etoile imposed
their unsatisfying sameness. . . . Trees were
headed, and their sides pared away ; many French
groves seem green chests set upon poles. Seats
of marble, arbours, and summer-houses, terminated
every vista." It is all very well for Temple to re-
commend the regular form of garden. " I should
hardly advise any of these attempts " cited by WTal-
pole, " in the form of gardens among us ; they are
adventures of too hard achievement for any common

102 GARDEN-CRAFT.

hands." The truth will out ! The " daintier sense "
of garden-craft has vanished ! According to Walpole,
garden-adventure is to be henceforth journeyman's
work, and Brown, the immortal kitchen-gardener,
leads the way.

It were unfair to suspect that the exigencies of
sprightly writing had carried Walpole beyond the
bounds of accuracy in his description of the stiff-
garden as he knew it, for things were in some re-
spects very bad indeed. At the same time he is so
engrossed with his abuse of old ways of gardening,
and advocacy of the landscape-gardener's new-fangled
notions, that his account of garden-craft generally
falls short of completeness. He omits, for instance,
to notice the progress in floriculture and horticulture
of this time, the acquisitions being made in the orna-
mental foreign plants to be cultivated in the open
ground, the green-house, and the stove. He omits to
note that Loudon and Wise stocked our gardens with
more than giants, animals, monsters, &c., in yew and
box and holly. Because the names of these two
worthies occur in this gardening text-book of Wai-
pole's, all later essayists signal them out for blame.
But Evelyn, who ranks as one of the three of England's
great gardeners of old days, has a kindlier word for
them. He is dilating upon the advantage to the gar-
dener of the high clipped hedge as a protection for his
shrubs and flowers, and goes on to particularise an
oblong square, palisadoed with a hornbeam hedge
" in that inexhaustible magazine at Brompton Park,
cultivated by those two industrious fellow-gardeners,

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 103

Mr. Loudon and Mr. Wise." This hedge protects
the orange trees, myrtles, and other rare perennials
and exotics from the scorching rays of the sun ; and
it equally well shelters the flowers. " Here the
Indian Narcissus, Tuberoses, Japan Lillies, Jasmines,
Jonquills, Periclimena, Roses, Carnations, with
all the pride of the parterre, intermixt between
the tree-cases, flowery vases, busts, and statues,
entertain the eye, and breathe their redolent odours
and perfumes to the smell." Clearly there is an
advantage in being a gardener if we write about
gardens (provided you are not a mere " landscape-
gardener !")

One cannot deny that Horace Walpole did well
to expose the absurd vagaries which were being per-
petrated about his time under Dutch influences.
Close alliance with Holland through the House of
Orange had affected every department of horti-
culture. True, it had enriched our gardens and
conservatories with many rare and beautiful species
of flowers and bulbs, and had imbued the English
collector with the tulip-mania. So far good. But
to the same source we trace the reign of the
shears in the English garden, which made Art in a
Garden ridiculous, and gave occasion to the enemy to
blaspheme.

" The gardeners about London," says Mr. Lam-
bert, writing to the Linnsean Transactions in 1712,
" were remarkable for fine cut greens, and dipt yews
in the shapes of birds, dogs, men, ships, &c. Mr.
Parkinson in Lambeth was much noticed for these

104 GARDEN-CRAFT.

things, and he had besides a few myrtles, oleanders,
and evergreens."

" The old order changeth .
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

And now is Art in a Garden become ridiculous.
Since the beginning of things English gardeners
had clipped and trimmed their shrubs ; but had never
carried the practice beyond a reasonable extent, and
had combined it with woody and shady effects. With
the onset of Dutch influence country-aspects vanish.
Nature is reduced to a prosaic level. The traditional
garden, whose past had been one long series of noble
chances in fine company, now found content as the
pedant's darling where it could have no opening for
living romance, but must be tricked out in stage con-
ventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of
shreds and patches !

Having Arrived at such a pass, it was time that
change should come, and change did come, with a
vengeance ! But let us not suppose that the change
was from wrong to right. For, indeed, the revolu-
tion meant only that formality gone mad should be
supplanted by informality gone equally mad. And
we may note as a significant fact, that the point of
departure is the destruction of the garden's bound-
aries, and the substitution of the ha-ha. It was
not for the wild improvers to realise how Art that
destroys its own boundaries is certainly doomed to
soon have no country to boast of at all ! It proved so
in this case. From this moment, the very thought

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 105

of garden-ornament was clean put out of mind, and
the grass is carried up to the windows of the great
house, as though the place were nothing better than
a farm-shanty in the wilds of Westmoreland !

But to return to the inauguration of the " land-
scape-garden." The hour produced its men in Kent,
and " the immortal Brown," as Repton calls him.
Like many another " discovery," theirs was really
due to an accident. Just as it was the closely-corked
bottle that popped that gave birth to champagne,
so it was only when our heroes casually leaped the
ha-ha that they had made that they realised that
all England outside was one vast rustic garden, from
whence it were a shame to exclude anything !

So began the rage for making all the surround-
ings of a house assume a supposed appearance of
rude Nature. Levelling, ploughing, stubbing-up, was
the order of the day. The British navvy was in
great request — in fact the day that Kent and Brown
discovered England was this worthy's natal day. Arti-
ficial gardens must be demolished as impostures, and
wriggling walks and turf put where they had stood.
Avenues must be cut down or disregarded ; the
groves, the alleys, the formal beds, the terraces, the
balustrades, the dipt hedges must be swept away as
things intolerable. For the " landscape style " does
not countenance a straight line, or terrace or archi-
tectural form, or symmetrical beds about the house ;
for to allow these would not be to photograph
Nature. As carried into practice, the style demands
that the house shall rise abruptly from the grass,

io6 GARDEN-CRAFT.

and the general surface of the ground shall be
characterised by smoothness and bareness (like
Nature !) Hence in the grounds of this period, house
and country

" Wrapt all o'er in everlasting green

Make one dull, vapid, smooth and tranquil scene. "

There is to my mind no more significant testi-
mony to the attractiveness and lovableness of the
regular garden as opposed to the opened-out bar-
barism of the landscape-gardener's invention, than
Horace Walpole's lament over the old gardens at
Houghton,* which has the force of testimony wrung
from unwilling lips : —

" When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told
me it was now called the ' pleasure- ground? What a dissonant idea
of pleasure ! Those groves, those alleys^ where I have passed so
many charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown ; many
fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my
memory. I met two gamekeepers and a thousand hares ! In the days
when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton
and its solitude ; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets,
I love Houghton ; — Houghton, I know not what to call it : a monu-
ment of grandeur or ruin ! " — (Walpole's Letters.)

" What a dissonant idea of pleasure/' this so-
called ' pleasure-ground of the landscape-gardener ! '
" Those groves, those alleys where I have passed so
many charming moments, stripped up ! How I loved
this garden ! " Here is the biter bit, and it were to
be more than human not to smile !

* Houghton was built by Sir R. Walpole, between 1722 and 1738.
The garden was laid out in the stiff, formal manner by Eyre, " an
imitator of Bridgman," and contained 23 acres. The park contains
some fine old beeches. More than 1,000 cedars were blown down
here in February, 1860.

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 107

With all the proper appliances at hand, it did not
take long to transform the stiff garden into the
barbaric. It did not take long to find out how not
to do what civilisation had so long been learning
how to do! The ancient " Geometric or Regular
style " of garden — the garden of the aristocrat, with
all its polished classicism — was to make way for the
so-called " Naturalesque or Landscape style," and the
garden of the bourgeois. Hope rose high in the
breasts of the new professoriate. " A boon ! a
boon ! " quoth the critic. And there is deep joy in
navvydom. " Under the great leader, Brown,"
writes Repton (" Landscape Gardening," p. 327), "or
rather those who patronised his discovery, we were
taught that Nature was to be our only model." It
was a grand moment. A Daniel had come to judg-
ment ! Nay, did not Brown " live to establish a
fashion in gardening which might have been expected
to endure as long as Nature should exist ! "

The Landscape School of Gardeners, so-called,
has been the theme of a great deal of literature, but
with the exception of Walpole's and Addison's essays,
and Pope's admirable chaff, very little has survived
the interest it had at the moment of publication.

The other chief writers of this School, in its early
phase, are George Mason, Whately,* Mason the

* Thomas Whately's " Observations on Modern Gardening," was
published in 1770, fifteen years before Walpole's "Essay on Modern
Gardening." Gilpin's book " On Picturesque Beauty," though pub-
lished in part in 1782, belongs really to the second phase of the Land-
scape School. Shenstone's " Unconnected Thoughts on the Garden"
was published in 1764, and is written pretty much from the standpoint
of Kent. " An Essay on Design in Gardening," by G. Mason, was
published in 1795.

loS GARDEN-CRAFT.

poet, and Shenstone, our moon-struck friend quoted
above, with his " assignation seats with proper
mottoes, urns to faithful lovers," &c. Dr. Johnson
did not think much of Shenstone's contributions to
gardening :

" He began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify
his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters, which he
did with such judgement and such fancy as made his little domain the
envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful — a place to be
visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a
walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where
there is an object to catch the view, to make water run where
it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen ; to leave
intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plan-
tation where there is something to be hidden — demand any great
powers of the mind, I will not enquire ; perhaps a surly and
sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than
the business of human reason." — (Dr. Johnson, " Lives of the Poets,"
Shenstone.)

Whately's " Observations on Modern Garden-
ing," published 1770, are well written and dis-
tinctly valuable as bearing upon the historical side
of the subject. It says little for his idea of the value
of Art in a garden, or of the function of a garden as
a refining influence in life, to find Whately recom-
mending " a plain field or a sheep-walk " as part of
a garden's embellishments — " as an agreeable relief,
and even wilder scenes."

But what astounds one more is, that a writer of
Whately's calibre can describe Kent's gardens at
Stowe, considered to be his masterpiece, as a sample
of the non-formality of the landscape-gardener's Art,
while he takes elaborate pains to show that it is
full of would-be artistic subterfuges in Nature, full of

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 109

architectural shams throughout. These gardens
were begun by Bridgman, " Begun," Whately says,
" when regularity was in fashion ; and the original
boundary is still preserved on account of its magnifi-
cence, for round the whole circuit, of between three
and four miles, is carried a very broad gravel-walk,
planted with rows of trees, and open either to the
park or the country ; a deep sunk-fence attends it
all the way, and comprehends a space of near 400
acres. But in the interior spaces of the garden
few traces of regularity appear ; where it yet
remains in the plantations it is generally dis-
guised ; every symptom almost of formality is
obliterated from the ground ; and an octagon basin
at the bottom is now converted into an irregular
piece of water, which receives on one hand two
beautiful streams, and falls on the other down a
cascade into a lake."

And then follows a list of sham architectural
features that are combined with sham views and
prospects to match. "The whole space is divided
into a number of scenes, each distinguished with
taste and fancy ; and the changes are so frequent, so
sudden and complete, the transitions so artfully con-
ducted, that the ideas are never continued or repeated
to satiety." In the front of the house two elegant
Doric pavilions. On the brow of some rising
grounds a Corinthian arch. On a little knoll an
open Ionic rotunda — an Egyptian pyramid stands on
its brow; the Queen's Pillar in a recess on the
descent, the King's Pillar elsewhere ; all the three

i io GARDEN-CRAFT.

buildings mentioned are " peculiarly adapted to a
garden scene." In front of a wood three pavilions
joined by arcades, all of the Ionic order, " character-
istically proper for a garden, and so purely orna-
mental." Then a Temple of Bacchus, the Elysian
fields, British remains ; misshaped elms and ragged
firs are frequent in a scene of solitude and gloom,
which the trunks of dead trees assist. Then a large
Gothic building, with slated roofs, " in a noble con-
fusion " ; then the Elysian fields, seen from the other
side, a Palladian bridge, Doric porticoes, &c., the
whole thing finished off with the Temple of Concord
and Victory, probably meant as a not-undeserved
compliment to the successfully chaotic skill of the
landscape-gardener, who is nothing if not irregular,
natural, non-formal, non-fantastical, non-artificial, and
non-geometrical.

Two other points about Whately puzzle me.
How comes he to strain at the gnat of formality in
the old-fashioned garden, yet readily swallow the
camel at Stowe ? How can he harmonise his appre-
ciation of the elaborately contrived and painfully
assorted shams at Stowe, with his recommendation
of a sheep-walk in your garden "as an agreeable
relief, and even wilder scenes " ?

Whether the beauty of the general disposition of
the ground at Stowe is to be attributed to Kent or
to Bridgman, who began the work, as Whately says,
"when regularity was in fashion," I cannot say. It
is right to observe, however, that the prevailing
characteristic of Kent's and Brown's landscapes was

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." in

their smooth and bald surface. " Why this art has
been called ' landscape-gardening,' " says the plain-
spoken Repton, " perhaps he who gave it the title
may explain. I can see no reason, unless it be the
efficacy which it has shown in destroying landscapes,
in which, indeed, it seems infallible." (Repton, p.
355-) "Our virtuosi," said Sir William Chambers,
" have scarcely left an acre of shade, or three trees
growing in a line from the Land's End to the
Tweed."

It did not take the wiser spirits long to realise
that Nature left alone was more natural. And this
same Repton, who began by praising "the great
leader Brown," has to confess again and again that,
so far as results go, he is mistaken. The ground,
he laments, must be everlastingly moved and altered.
" One of the greatest difficulties I have experienced
in practice proceeds from that fondness for levelling
so prevalent in all Brown's workmen ; every hillock
is by them lowered, and every hollow filled, to pro-
duce a level surface." (Repton, p. 342.) Or again
(p. 347) : "There is something so fascinating in the ap-
pearance of water, that Mr. Brown thought it carried
its own excuse, however unnatural the situation ;
and therefore, in many places, under his direction,
I have found water, on the tops of the hills, which
I have been obliged to remove into lower ground
because the deception was not sufficiently complete to
satisfy the mind as well as the eye}'1 Indeed, in this
matter of levelling, Brown's system does not, on the
face of it, differ from Le Notre's, where the natural

H2 GARDEN-CRAFT.

contour of the landscape was not of much account; or
rather, it was thought the better if it had no natural
contour at all, but presented a flat plain or plateau
with no excrescences to interfere with the designer's
schemes.

So much, then, for the pastoral simplicity of
Nature edited by the " landscape-gardener." And
let us note that under the auspices of the new regime,
not only is Nature to be changed, but changed more
than was ever dreamt of before ; the transformation
shall at once be more determined in its character and
more deceptive than had previously been attempted.
We were to have an artistically natural world, not a
naturally artistic one ; the face of the landscape was
to be purged of its modern look and made to look
primaeval. And in this doing, or undoing, of things,
the only art that was to be admitted was. the art of
consummate deceit, which shall " satisfy the mind
as well as the eye." Yet call the man pope or
presbyter, and beneath his clothes he is the same
man ! There is not a pin to choose as regards
artificiality in the aims of the two schools, only in
the results. The naked or undressed garden has
studied irregularity, while the dressed garden has
studied regularity and style. The first has, perhaps,
an excessive regard for expression, the other has an
emphatic scorn for expression. One garden has its
plotted levels, its avenues, its vistas, its sweeping
lawns, its terraces, its balustrades, colonnades,
geometrical beds, gilded temples, and sometimes its
fountains that won't play, and its fine vases full of

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 113

nothing ! The other begins with fetching back the
chaos of a former world, and has for its category of
effects, sham primaevalisms, exaggerated wildness,
tortured levellings, cascades, rocks, dead trunks of
trees, ruined castles, lakes on the tops of hills, 'and
sheep-runs hard by your windows. One school
cannot keep the snip of the scissors off tree and
shrub, the other mimics Nature's fortuitous wild-
ness in proof of his disdain for the white lies of
Art.

And all goes to show, does it not? that inasmuch
as the art of gardening implies craft, and as man's
imitation of Nature is bound to be unlike Nature, it
were wise to be frankly inventive in gardening on
Art lines. Success may attend one's efforts in the
direction of Art, but in the direction of Nature,
never.

The smooth, bare, and almost bald appearance
which characterises Brown and Kent's school fails
to satisfy for long, and there springs up another
school which deals largely in picturesque elements,
and rough intricate effects. The principles of the
" Picturesque School," as it was called, are to be
found in the writings of the Rev. William Gilpin and
Sir Uvedale Price. Their books are full of careful
observations upon the general composition of land-
scape-scenery, and what was then called "Landscape
Architecture," as though every English building of
older days that was worth a glance had not been
" Landscape Architecture " fit for its site ! Gilpin's
writings contain an admirable discourse upon

ii4 GARDEN-CRAFT.

11 Forest Scenery," well illustrated. This work is in
eight volumes, in part published in 1782, and it
consists mainly in an account of the author's tours
in every part of Great Britain, with a running
commentary on the beauties of the scenery, and a
description of the important country seats he passed
on the way. Price helped by his writings to stay
the rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and we
note that he is fully alive to the necessity of uniting
a country-house with the surrounding scenery by
architectural adjuncts.

The taste for picturesque gardening was doubtless
helped by the growing taste for landscape painting,
exhibited in the works of the school of Wilson and
Gainsborough, and in the pastoral writings of
Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and Gray. It would
farther be accelerated, as we suggested at the outset
of this chapter, by the large importation of foreign
plants and shrubs now going on.

What is known as the Picturesque School soon
had for its main exponent Repton. He was a genius
in his way — a born gardener,* able and thoughtful
in his treatments, and distinguished among his fellows
by a broad and comprehensive grasp of the whole
character and surroundings of a site, in reference to
the general section of the land, the style of the house
to which his garden was allied, and the objects for
which it was to be used. The sterling quality of his

* Loudon calls this School " Repton's," the " Gardenesqiic "
School, its characteristic feature being " the display of the beauty
of trees and other plants individually"

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 115

writings did much to clear the air of the vapourings
of the critics who had gone before him, and his
practice, founded as it was upon sound principles,
redeemed the absurdities of the earlier phase of his
school and preserved others from further develop-
ment of the silly rusticities upon which their mind
seemed bent. Although some of his ideas may now
be thought pedantic and antiquated, the books which
contain them will not die. Passages like the follow-
ing mark the man and his aims : " I do not profess
to follow Le Notre or Brown, but, selecting beauties
from the style of each, to adopt so much of the
grandeur of the former as may accord with a palace,
and so much of the grace of the latter as may call
forth the charms of natural landscape. Each has its
proper situation ; and good taste will make fashion
subservient to good sense" (p. 234). " In the rage
for picturesque beauty, let us remember that the land-
scape holds an inferior rank to the historical picture ;
one represents nature, the other relates to man in a
state of society " (p. 236).

Repton sums up the whole of his teaching in the
preface to his ''Theory and Practice of Landscape
Gardening" under the form of objections to prevail-
ing errors, and they are so admirable that I cannot
serve the purposes of my book better than to insert
them here.

Objection No. i. "There is no error more
prevalent in modern gardening, or more frequently
carried to excess, than taking away hedges to unite
many small fields into one extensive and naked lawn;

I 2

n6 GARDEN-CRAFT.

before plantations are made to give it the appearance
of a park ; and where ground is subdivided by sunk
fences, imaginary freedom is dearly purchased at the
expense of actual confinement."

No. 2. " The baldness and nakedness round the
house is part of the same mistaken system, of con-
cealing fences to gain extent. A palace, or even an
elegant villa, in a grass field, appears to me incon-
gruous ; yet I have seldom had sufficient influence to
correct this common error"

No. 3. " An approach which does not evidently
lead to the house, or which does not take the
shortest course, cannot be right. (This rule must be
taken with certain limitations.) The shortest road
across a lawn to a house will seldom be found
graceful, and often vulgar. A road bordered by
trees in the form of an avenue may be straight with-
out being vulgar ; and grandeur, not grace or ele-
gance, is the expression expected to be produced."

No. 4. " A poor man's cottage, divided into what
is called a pair of lodges, is a mistaken expedient to
mark importance in the entrance to a park."

No. 5. " The entrance-gate should not be visible
from the mansion, unless it opens into a court-
yard."

No. 6. " The plantation surrounding a place
called a Belt I have never advised ; nor have I ever
willingly marked a drive, or walk, completely round
the verge of a park, except in small villas, where a
dry path round a person's own field is always more
interesting than any other walk."

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." n?

No. 7. " Small plantations of trees, surrounded
by a fence, are the best expedients to form groups,
because trees planted singly seldom grow well ;
neglect of thinning and removing the fence
has produced that ugly deformity called a
Clump."

No. 8. " Water on an eminence, or on the side of
a hill, is among the most common errors of Mr.
Brown's followers ; in numerous instances I have
been allowed to remove such pieces of water from
the hills to the valleys, but in many my advice has
not prevailed."

No. 9. " Deception may be allowable in imi-
tating the works of Nature. Thus artificial rivers,
lakes, and rock scenery can only be great by
deception, and the mind acquiesces in the fraud
after it is detected, but in works of Art every
trick ought to be avoided. Sham churches, sham
ruins, sham bridges, and everything which ap-
pears what it is not, disgusts when the trick is
discovered."

No. 10. " In buildings of every kind the character
should be strictly observed. No incongruous
mixture can be justified. To add Grecian to
Gothic, or Gothic to Grecian, is equally absurd ;
and a sharp pointed arch to a garden gate or a dairy
window, however frequently it occurs, is not less
offensive than Grecian architecture, in which the
standard rules of relative proportion are neglected
or violated."

The perfection of landscape-gardening consists

1 1 8 GARDEN-CRAFT.

in the fullest attention to these principles, Utility,
Proportion, and Unity, or harmony of parts to the
whole. (Repton, " Landscape Gardening," pp.

128-9.)

The best advice one can give to a young gardener
is — know your Repton.

The writings of the new school of gardening, of
which Repton is a notable personage in its later
phase, are not, however, on a par with the writings
of the old traditional school, either as pleasant garden
literature, or in regard to broad human interest or
artistic quality. They are hard and critical, and
never lose the savour of the heated air of contro-
versy in which they were penned. Indeed, I can
think of no more sure and certain cure for a bad
attack of garden-mania — nothing that will sooner
wipe the bloom off your enjoyment of natural beauty —
than a course of reading from the Classics of Land-
scape-garden literature ! " I only sound the claricn,"
said the urbane master-gardener of an earlier da}-,
" but I enter not into the battle." But these are at
one another's throats ! Who enters here must leave
his dreams of fine gardening behind, for he will find
himself in a chilly, disenchanted world, with nothing
more romantic to feed his imagination upon than
" Remarks on the genius of the late Mr. Brown,"
Critical enquiries, Observations on taste, Difference
between landscape gardening and painting, Price
upon Repton, Repton upon Price, Repton upon
Knight, further answers to Messrs. Price and Knight,
&c. But all this is desperately dull reading, hurt-

THE " LANDSCAPE-GARDEN? 1 19

ful to one's imagination, fatal to garden-fervour.*
And naturally so, for analysis of the processes of
garden-craft carried too far begets loss of faith in all.
Analysis is a kill-joy, destructive of dreams of beauty.
" We murder to dissect." That was a true word of
the cynic of that day, who summed up current con-
troversy upon gardening in the opinion that " the
works of Nature were well executed, but in a bad
taste." The quidnuncs' books about gardening are
about as much calculated to give one delight, as the
music the child gets out of the strings of an instru-
ment that it broke for the pride of dissection. Even
Addison, with the daintiest sense and prettiest pen
of them all, shows how thoroughly gardening had
lost

. . . . " its happy, country tone,
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost,"—

as he thrums out his laboured coffee-house conceit.
" I think there are as many kinds of gardening as
poetry ; your makers of parterres and flower-
gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this
art ; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages, and
cascades, are romance writers. Wise and Loudon
are our heroic poets." Nor is his elaborate argu-
ment meant to prove the gross inferiority of Art in a

* A candid friend thus writes to Repton : " You may have per-
ceived that I am rather too much inclined to the Price and Knight
party, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted
by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship, that I have
been sick of pictures for a month, and almost of Nature, when the
same jargon was applied to her." (Repton, p. 232.)

120 GARDEN-CRAFT.

garden to unadorned Nature more inspiring. Nay,
what is one to make of even the logic of such argu-
ment as this ? " If the products of Nature rise in
value according as they more or less resemble those
of Art, we may be sure that artificial works receive a
greater advantage from their resemblance of such as
are natural." (Spectator.) But who does apply the
Art-standard to Nature, or value her products as
they resemble those of Art ? And has not Sir
Walter well said: "Nothing is more the child of
Art than a garden " ? And Loudon : "All art, to be
acknowledged, as art must be avowed."

One prefers to this cold Pindaric garden-homage
the unaffected, direct delight in the sweets of a
garden of an earlier day ; to realise with old Moun-
taine how your garden shall produce "a jucunditie
of minde ; " to think with Bishop Hall, as he gazes
at his tulips, " These Flowers are the true Clients of
the Sunne ; " to be brought to old Lawson's state of
simple ravishment, "What more delightsome than
an infinite varietie of sweet-smelling flowers ? deck-
ing with sundry colours the green mantle of the Earth,
colouring not onely the earth, but decking the ayre,
and sweetning every breath and spirit ; " to taste the
joys of living as, taking Robert Burton's hand, you
" walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts
and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets,
groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such like
pleasant places, between wood and water, in a fair
meadow, by a river side, to disport in some pleasant
plain or park, must needs be a delectable recreation ; "

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 121

to be inoculated with old Gerarde of the garden-
mania as he bursts forth, " Go forwarde in the name
of God : graffe, set, plant, nourishe up trees in every
corner of your grounde ; " to trace with Temple the
lines and features that go to make the witchery of the
garden at Moor Park, " in all kinds the most beau-
tiful and perfect, at least in the Figure and Disposition,
that I have ever seen," and which you may follow if
you are not " above the Regards of Common Expence;"
to hearken to Bacon expatiate upon the Art which is
indeed " the purest of all humane pleasure, the
greatest refreshment to the Spirits of man ; " to feel
in what he says the value of an ideal, the magic of a
style backed by passion — to have garden precepts
wrapped in pretty metaphors (such as that " because
the Breath of Flowers is far Sweeter in the Air — where
it comes and goes like the warbling of Musick — than
in the Hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that
Delight than to know what be the Flowers and Plants
that do best perfume the Air ; ") — to be taught how to
order a garden to suit all the months of the year,
and have the things of beauty enumerated according
to their seasons — to feel rapture at the sweet-
breathing presence of Art in a garden — to learn from
one who knows how to garden in a grand manner,
and yet be finally assured that beauty does not
require a great stage, that the things thrown in " for
state and magnificence " are but nothing to the true
pleasure of a garden — this is garden-literature
worth reading !

Compared with the frank raptures of such

122 GARDEN-CRAFT.

writings as these, the laboured treatises of the
landscape-school are but petty hagglings over the
mint and cummin of things. You go to the writings
of the masters of the old formality, to come away
invigorated as by a whiff of mountain air straight off
Helicon ; they shall give one fresh enthusiasm for
Nature, fresh devotion to Art, fresh love for beautiful
things. But from the other —

" The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I "-

they deal with technicalities in the affected language
of connoisseurship; they reveal a disenchanted world,
a world of exploded hopes given over to the navvies
and the critics ; and it is no wonder that writings so
prompted should have no charm for posterity ;
charm they never had. They are dry as summer
dust.

For the honour of English gardening, and before
closing this chapter, I would like to recall that be-
tweenity — the garden of the transition — done at the
very beginning of the century of revolution, which
unites something of the spirit of the old and of the
new schools. Here is Sir Walter Scott's report of
the Kelso garden as he first knew it, and after it had
been mauled by the landscape-gardener. It was
a garden of seven or eight acres adjacent to the
house of an ancient maiden lady :

" It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and
hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were
thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which access
was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks, calling itself a
labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a splendid Platanus or
Oriental plane, a huge hill of leaves, one of the noblest specimens of

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN:

that regularly beautiful tree which we remember to have seen. In
different parts of the garden were fine ornamental trees which had
attained great size, and the orchard was filled with fruit-trees of the
best description. There were seats and trellis-walks, and a ban-
queting-house. Even in our time this little scene, intended to present
a formal exhibition of vegetable beauty, was going fast to decay.
The parterres of flowers were no longer watched by the quiet and
simple friends under whose auspices they had been planted, and
much of the ornament of the domain had been neglected or destroyed
to increase its productive value. We visited it lately, after an absence
of many years. Its air of retreat, the seclusion which its alleys
afforded was gone ; the huge Platanus had died, like most of its kind,
in the beginning of this century ; the hedges were cut down, the trees
stubbed up, and the whole character of the place so much destroyed
that I was glad when I could leave it." — (" Essay on Landscape Gar-
dening," Quarterly Review, 1828.*)

Another garden, of later date than this at Kelso,
and somewhat less artistic, is that described by Mr.
Henry A. Bright in " The English Flower Garden. "t

" One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost
entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had
certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had every
advantage in the soft climate of the West of England. The various
lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you wandered on
from one to the other, and always came on something new. In front
of these shrubberies was a large margin of flower-border, gay with
the most effective plants and annuals. At the corner of the lawn a
standard Magnolia grandiflora of great size held up its chaliced
blossoms ; at another a tulip-tree was laden with hundreds of yellow
flowers. Here a magnificent Salisburia mocked the foliage of the
maiden-hair ; and here an old cedar swept the grass with its large
pendent branches. But the main breadth of each lawn was never
destroyed, and past them you might see the reaches of a river, now
in one aspect, now in another. Each view was different, and each was
a fresh enjoyment and surprise.

" A few years ago and I revisited the place; the 'improver' had
been at work, and had been good enough to open up the view. Shrub-'
beries had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together. The
pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had become
open spaces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to be seen.

* " The Praise of Gardens," pp. 185-6.
t Ibid., p. 296.

24 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained numberless
rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the lawn in front of
the house was cut up into little beds of red pelargoniums, yellow
calceolarias, and the rest."

In this example we miss the condensed beauty
and sweet austerities of the older garden at Kelso ;
nevertheless, it represents a phase of workmanship
which, for its real insight into the secrets of garden-
beauty, we may well be proud of, and deplore its
destruction at the hands of the landscape-gardener.

All arts are necessarily subject to progression of
type. " Man cannot escape from his time," says
Mr. Morley, and with changed times come changed
influences. But, then, to progress is not to change :
" to progress is to live," and one phase of healthy
progression will tread the heels of that which pre-
cedes it. The restless changeful methods of modern
gardening are, however, not to be ascribed to the
healthy development of one consistent movement,
but to chaos — to the revolution that ensued upon the
overthrow of tradition — to the indeterminateness of
men who have no guiding principles, who take so
many wild leaps in the dark, in the course of which,
rival champions jostle one another and only the
fittest survives.

In treating of Modern English Gardening, it is
difficult to make our way along the tortuous path of
change, development it is not, that set in with the
banishment of Art in a garden. Critical writers have
done their best to unravel things, to find the relation
of each fractured phase, and to give each phase a
descriptive name, but there are still many un-

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN?

12:

explained points, many contradictions that are un-
solved, to which I have already alluded.

Loudon's Introduction to Repton's " Landscape
Gardening " gives perhaps the most intelligible
account of the whole matter. The art of laying out
grounds has been displayed in two very distinct
styles : the first of which is called the " Ancient
Roman, Geometric, Regular, or Architectural Style ;
and the second the Modern ; English* Irregular,
Natural, or Landscape Style."

We have, he says, the Italian, the French, and
the Dutch Schools of the Geometric Style. The
Modern, or Landscape Style, when it first displayed
itself in English country residences, was distinctly
marked by the absence of everything that had the
appearance of a terrace, or of architectural forms, or
lines, immediately about the house. The house, in
short, rose abruptly from the lawn, and the general
surface of the ground was characterised by smooth-
ness and bareness. This constituted the first School of
the Landscape Style, introduced by Kent and Brown.

This manner was followed by the romantic or
Picturesque Style, which inaugurates a School which
aimed at producing architectural tricks and devices,
allied with scenery of picturesque character and
sham rusticity. The conglomeration at Stowe, albeit
that it is attributed to Kent, shows what man can do
in the way of heroically wrong garden-craft.

* This is a little unpatriotic of Loudon to imply that the English
had no garden-style till the i8th century, but one can stand a great
deal from Loudon.

126 GARDEX-CRAFT.

To know truly how to lay out a garden " After a
more Grand and Rural Manner than has been done
before" you cannot do better than get Batty Lang-
ley's " New Principles of Gardening," and among other
things you have rules whereby you may concoct
natural extravagances, how you shall prime pros-
pects, make landscapes that are pictures of nothing
and very like ; how to copy hills, valleys, dales,
purling streams, rocks, ruins, grottoes, precipices,
amphitheatres, &c.

The writings of Gilpin and Price were effective in
undermining Kent's School ; they helped to check the
rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and insisted
upon the propriety of uniting a country-house with
the surrounding scenery by architectural appendages.
The leakage from the ranks of Kent's School was
not all towards the Picturesque School, but to what
Loudon terms Repton's School, which may be con-
sidered as combining all that was excellent in what
had gone before.

Following upon these phases is one that is oddly
called the " Gardenesque " Style, the leading feature
of which is that it illustrates the beauty of trees, and
other plants individually ; in short, it is the speci-
men style. According to the practice of all previ-
ous phases of modern gardening, trees, shrubs, and
flowers were indiscriminately mixed and crowded
together, in shrubberies or other plantations. Accord-
ing to the Gardenesque School, all the trees and
shrubs are arranged to suit their kinds and dimen-
sions, and to display them to advantage. The ablest

THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN." 127

exponents of the school are Loudon in the recent
past, and Messrs. Marnock and Robinson in the
present, and their method is based upon Loudon.

To know how to lay out a garden after the
most approved modern fashion we have but to turn
to the deservedly popular pages of " The English
Flower Garden." This book contains not only model
designs and commended examples from various
existing gardens, but text contributed by some
seventy professional and amateur gardeners. Even
the gardener who has other ideals and larger
ambitions than are here expected, heartily welcomes
a book so well stored with modern garden-lore up to
date, with suggestions for new aspects of vegetation,
new renderings of plant life, and must earnestly
desire to see any system of gardening made perfect
after its kind —

" I wish the sun should shine
On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine."

•Gardening is, above all things, a progressive Art
which has never had so fine a time to display its
possibilities as now, if we were only wise enough to
freely employ old experiences and modern opportu-
nities. People are, however, so readily content with
their stereotyped models, with barren imitations,
with their petty list of specimens, when instead of
half-a-dozen kinds of plants, their garden has room
for hundreds of different plants of fine form — hardy
or half-hardy, annual and bulbous — which would
equally well suit the British garden and add to its
wealth of beauty by varied colourings in spring,

128 GARDEN-CRAFT.

summer, and autumn. At present " the choke-
muddle shrubbery, in which the poor flowering
shrubs dwindle and kill each other, generally sup-
ports a few ill-grown and ill-chosen plants, but it
is mainly distinguished for wide patches of bare
earth in summer, over which, in better hands, pretty
green things might crowd." The speci'men plant has
no chaiice of displaying itself under such conditions.

Into so nice a subject as the practice of Landscape-
gardening of the present day it is not my intention
to enter in detail, and for two good reasons. In the
first place, the doctrines of a sect are best known by
the writings of its representatives ; and in this case,
happily, both writings and representatives are plenti-
ful. Secondly, I do not see that there is much to
chronicle. Landscape-gardening is, in a sense, still
in its fumbling stage ; it has not increased its
resources, or done anything heroic, even on wrong
lines ; it has not advanced towards any permanent,
definable system of ornamentation since it began its
gyrations in the last century. Its rival champions
still beat the air. Even Repton was better off than
the men of to-day, for he had, at least, his Protestant
formulary of Ten Objections to swear by, which "mark
those errors or absurdities in modern gardening
and architecture to which I have never willingly
subscribed" (p. 127 " Theory and Practice of Land-
scape-Gardening," 1803, quoted in full above).

But the present race of landscape-gardeners are,
it strikes me, as much at sea as ever. True they

THE " LANDSCAPE GARDEN? 129

threw up traditional methods as unworthy, but they
had not learnt their own Art according to Nature
before they began to practise it ; and they are still
in the throes of education. Their intentions are
admirable beyond telling, but their work exhibits in
the grossest forms the very vices they condemn in
the contrary school ; for the expression of their ideas
is self-conscious, strained, and pointless. To know
at a glance their position towards Art in a garden,
how crippled their resources, how powerless to design,
let me give an extract from Mr. Robinson. He is
speaking of an old-fashioned garden, " One of those
classical gardens, the planners of which prided them-
selves upon being able to give Nature lessons of
good behaviour, to teach her geometry and the fine
Art of irreproachable lines ; but Nature abhors
lines ; * she is for geometers a reluctant pupil, and if
she submits to their tyranny she does it with bad
grace, and with the firm resolve to take eventually
her revenge. Man cannot conquer the wildness of
her disposition, and so soon as he is no longer at
hand to impose his will, so soon as he relaxes his
care, she destroys his work " (p. viii., " English
Flower Garden"). This is indeed to concede every-
thing to Nature, to deny altogether the mission of
Art in a garden.

* For which reason, I suppose, Mr. Robinson, in his model " Non-
geometrical Gardens " (p. 5), humbly skirts his ground with a path
which as nearly represents a tortured horse-shoe as Nature would
permit ; and his trees he puts in a happy-go-lucky-way, and allows them
to nearly obliterate his path at their own sweet will ! No wonder he
does not fear Nature's revenge, where is so little Art to destroy !

K

130 GARDEN-CRAFT.

And even the School that is rather kinder to Art,
more lenient to tradition, represented by Mr. Milner —
even he, in his admirable book upon the " Art and
Practice of Landscape Gardening" (1890), is the
champion of Nature, not of Art, in a garden. " Nature
still seems to work in fetters," he says, and he would
" form bases for a better practice of the Art " (p. 4).
Again, " Nature is the great exemplar that I
follow " (p. 8).

They have not got beyond Brown, so far as
theory is concerned. " Under the great leader
Brown," writes Repton, with unconscious irony,
" or rather those who patronised his discovery, we
were taught that Nature was to be our only model " —
and Brown had his full chance of manipulating the
universe, for " he lived to establish a fashion in
gardening, which might have been expected to
endure as long as Nature should exist " ; and yet
Repton's work mostly consisted in repairing Brown's
errors and in covering the nakedness of his hungry
prospects. So it would seem that Art has her
revenges as well as Nature ! " The way of trans-
gressors is hard ! "

The Landscape-gardener, I said, gets no nearer to
maturity of purpose as time runs on. He creeps and
shuffles after Nature as at the first — much as the
benighted traveller after the will-o'-the-wisp. He
may not lay hands on her, because you cannot
conquer her wildness, nor impose your will upon
her, or teach her good behaviour. He may not
apply the " dead formalism of Art " to her, for

THE "LANDSCAPE GARDEN." 131

" Nature abhors lines. " Hence his mimicry can

never rise above Nature. Indeed, if it remains

faithful to the negative opinions of its practitioners,

landscape-gardening will never construct any system

of device. It has no creed, if you except that sole

article of its faith, " I believe in the non-geometrical

garden." A monumental style is an impossibility

while it eschews all features that make for state

and magnificence and symmetry ; a little park

scenery, much grass, curved shrubberies, the

" laboured littleness " of emphasised specimen plants

— the hardy ones dotted about in various parts —

wriggling paths, flower-borders, or beds of shapes

that imply that they are the offspring of bad dreams,

and its tale of effects is told. But as for " fine

gardening," that was given up long ago as a bad

job ! The spirit of Walpole's objections to the heroic

enterprise of the old-fashioned garden still holds the

" landscape-gardener " in check. " I should hardly

advise any of those attempts," says Walpole ; "they

are adventures of too hard achievement for any common

hands.11

It is not so much at what he finds in the landscape-
gardener's creations that the architect demurs, but at
what he misses. It is not so much at what the
landscape-gardener recommends that the architect
objects, as at what moving in his own little orbit
he wilfully shuts out, basing his opposition to tradi-
tion upon such an ex parte view of the matter as this
— " There are really two styles, one straitlaced,
mechanical, with much wall and stone, or it may be

K 2

132 GARDEN-CRAFT.

gravel, with much also of such geometry as the
designer of wall-papers excels in — often poorer than
that, with an immoderate supply of spouting water,
and with trees in tubs as an accompaniment, and,
perhaps, griffins and endless plaster-work, and
sculpture of the poorer sort." Why " poorer " ?
"The other, with right desire, though often awk-
wardly (!) accepting Nature as a guide, and en-
deavouring to illustrate in our gardens, so far as
convenience and knowledge will permit, her many
treasures of the world of flowers." (" English
Flower Garden "). How sweetly doth bunkum
commend itself !

It is not that the architect is small-minded
enough to cavil at the landscape-gardener's right
to display his taste by his own methods, but that he
strikes for the same right for himself. It is not that
he would rob the landscape-gardener of the pleasure
of expressing his own views as persuasively as he
can, but that he resents that air of superiority which
the other puts on as he bans the comely types and
garnered sweetness of old England's garden, that he
accents the proscription of the ways of interpreting
Nature that have won the sanction of lovers of Art
and Nature of all generations of our forefathers, and
this from a School whose prerogative dates no farther
back than the discovery of the well-meaning, clumsy,
now dethroned kitchen-gardener, known a short
century since as " the immortal Brown." There is
no reviewer so keen as Time !

133

CHAPTER VI.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING.*

" Nothing is more the Child of Art than a Garden."

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

" FOR every Garden," says Sir William Temple, " four
things are to be provided — Flowers, Fruit, Shade,
and Water, and whoever lays out a garden without
these, must not pretend it in any perfection. Nature
should not be forced ; great sums may be thrown
away without Effect or Honour, if there want sense in
proportion to this." Briefly, the old master's charge
is this : " Have common-sense ; follow Nature."

Following upon these lines, the gardener's first
duty in laying out the grounds to a house is, to study
the site, and not only that part of it upon which the
house immediately stands, but the whole site, its
aspect, character, soil, contour, sectional lines, trees,
&c. Common-sense, Economy, Nature, Art, alike
dictate this. There is an individual character to
every plot of land, as to every human face in a
crowd ; and that man is not wise who, to suit

* These notes make no pretence either at originality or complete-
ness. They represent gleanings from various sources, combined with
personal observations on garden-craft from the architect's point of
view. — J. D. S.

134 GARDEN-CRAFT.

preferences for any given style of garden, or with
a view to copying a design from another place,
will ignore the characteristics of the site at his
disposal.

Equally unwise will he be to follow that school
of gardening that makes chaos before it sets about to
make order. Features that are based upon, or that
grow out of the natural formation of the ground, will
not only look better than the created features, but
be more to the credit of the gardener, if successful,
and will save expense.

The ground throughout should be so handled
that every natural good point, every tree, mound,
declivity, stream, or quarry, or other chance fea-
ture, shall be turned to good account, and its con-
sequence heightened, avoiding the error of giving
the thing mock importance, by planting, digging,
lowering declivities, raising prominences, planting
dark-foliaged trees to intensify the receding parts,
forming terraces on the slope, or adding other archi-
tectural features as may be advisable to connect the
garden with the house which is its raison d'etre,
and the building with the landscape.

What folly to throw down undulations in order
to produce a commonplace level, or to throw up
hills, or make rocks, lakes, and waterfalls should the
site happen to be level ! What folly to make a
standing piece of water imitate the curves of a
winding river that has no existence, to throw a
bridge over it near its termination, so as to close the
vista and suggest the continuation of the water

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 135

beyond ! Nay, what need of artificial lakes at all if
there be a running stream hard by ? *

It is of the utmost importance that Art and
Nature should be linked together, alike in the near
neighbourhood of the house, and in its far prospect,
so that the scene as it meets the eye, whether at a
distance or near, should present a picture of a simple
whole, in which each item should take its part
without disturbing the individual expression of the
ground.

To attain this result, it is essential that the
ground immediately about the house should be
devoted to symmetrical planning, and to distinctly
ornamental treatment ; and the symmetry should
break away by easy stages from the dressed to the
undressed parts, and so on to the open country,
beginning with wilder effects upon the country-
boundaries of the place, and more careful and intri-
cate effects as the house is approached. Upon the
attainment of this appearance of graduated formality
much depends. One knows houses that are well
enough in their way, that yet figure as absolute blots
upon God's landscape, and that make a man writhe as at

* " All rational improvement of grounds is necessarily founded on
a due attention to the CHARACTER and SITUATION of the place to be
improved ; the former teaches what is advisable, the latter what is
possible to be done. The situation of a place always depends on
Nature, which can only be assisted, but cannot be entirely changed,
or greatly controlled by ART ; but the character of a place is wholly
dependent on ART ; thus the house, the buildings, the gardens, the
roads, the bridges, and every circumstance which marks the habitation
of man must be artificial ; and although in the works of art we may
imitate the forms and graces of Nature, yet, to make them truly
natural, always leads to absurdity" (Repton, p. 341).

136 GARDEN-CRAFT.

false notes in music, and all because due regard has
not been paid to this particular. By exercise of
forethought in this matter, the house and garden
would have been linked to the site, and the site to
the landscape ; as it is, you wish the house at
Jericho ! *

As the point of access to a house from the public
road and the route to be taken afterwards not infre-
quently determines the position of the house upon
the site, it may be well to speak of the Approach
first. In planning the ground, care will be taken
that the approach shall both look well of itself and
afford convenient access to the house and its appur-
tenances, not forgetting the importance of giving to
the visitor a pleasing impression of the house as he
drives up.

* Not so thinks the author of " The English Flower Garden : " —
" Imagine the effect of a well-built and fine old house, seen from the
extremity of a wide lawn, with plenty of trees and shrubs on its outer
parts, and nothing to impede the view of the house or its windows but
a refreshing carpet of grass. If owners of parks were to consider this
point fully, and, as they travel about, watch the effect of such lawns as
remain to us, and compare them with what has been done by certain
landscape-gardeners, there would shortly be, at many a country-seat,
a rapid carting away of the terrace and all its adjuncts." Marry, this
is sweeping ! But Repton has some equally strong words condemning
the very plan our Author recommends : " In the execution of my pro-
fession I have often experienced great difficulty and opposition in
attempting to correct thq false and mistaken taste for placing a large
house in a naked grass field, without any apparent line of separation
between the ground exposed to cattle and the ground annexed to the
house, which I consider as peculiarly under the management of art.

" This line of separation being admitted, advantage may be easily
taken to ornament the lawn with flowers and shrubs, and to attach to
the mansion that scene of 'embellished neatness' usually called a
pleasure-ground" (Repton, p. 213. See also No. 2 of Repton's
"Objections," given on p. 116).

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 137

In Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the usual
form of approach was the straight avenue, instances
of which are still to be seen at Montacute, Brymp-
ton, and Burleigh.* The road points direct to the
house, as evidence that in the minds of the old
architects the house was, as it were, the pivot round
which the attached territory and the garden in all its
parts radiated ; and the road ends, next the house, in
a quadrangle or forecourt, which has either an open
balustrade or high hedge, and in the centre of the
court is a grass plot enlivened by statue or fountain
or sundial. And it is worthy of note that they who
prefer a road that winds to the very door of a house
on the plea of its naturalness make a great mistake ;
they forget that the winding road is no whit less
artificial than the straight one.

The choice of avenue or other type of approach
will mainly depend upon the character and situation
of the house, its style and quality. Repton truly
observes that when generally adopted the avenue
reduces all houses to the same landscape — " if looking
up a straight line, between two green walls, deserves
the name of a landscape." He states his objections
to avenues thus — " If at the end of a long avenue be
placed an obelisk or temple, or any other eye-trap,
ignorance or childhood alone will be caught and
pleased by it ; the eye of taste or experience hates
compulsion, and turns away with disgust from every
artificial means of attracting its notice ; for this

* As an instance of how much dignity a noble house may lose by
a meanly-planned drive, I would mention Hatfield.

138 GARDEN-CRAFT.

reason an avenue is most pleasing which, like that at
Langley Park, climbs up a hill, and passing over the
summit, leaves the fancy to conceive its termina-
tion."

The very dignity of an avenue seems to demand
that there shall be something worthy of this proces-
sion of trees at its end, and if the house to which
this feature is applied be unworthy, a sense of dis-
appointment ensues. Provided, however, that the
house be worthy of this dignity, and that its intro-
duction does not mar the view, or dismember the
ground, an avenue is both an artistic and convenient
approach.

Should circumstances not admit of the use of an
avenue, the drive should be as direct as may well be,
and if curved, there should be some clear and obvious
justification for the curve or divergence ; it should be
clear that the road is diverted to obtain a glimpse of
open country that would otherwise be missed, or
that a steep hill or awkward dip is thus avoided.
The irregularity in the line of the road should not,
however, be the occasion of any break in the gradient
of the road, which should be continuously even
throughout. In this matter of planning roads,
common sense, as well as artistic sense, should be
satisfied ; there should be no straining after pompous
effects. Except in cases where the house is near to
the public road, the drive should not run parallel to
the road for the mere sake of gaining a pretentious
effect. Nor should the road overlook the garden, a
point that touches the comfort both of residents and

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 139

visitors; and for the same reason the entrance to the
garden should not be from the drive, but from the
house.

The gradient recommended by Mr. Milner,* to
whose skilled experience I am indebted for many
practical suggestions, is I in 14. The width of a
drive is determined by the relative importance of the
route. Thus, a drive to the principal entrance of the
house should be from 14 to 18 ft., while that to the
stables or offices 10 ft. Walks should not be less
than 6 ft. wide. The width of a grand avenue should
be 50 ft., and " the trees may be preferably Elm,
Beech, Oak, Chestnut, and they should not be planted
nearer in precession than 40 ft., unless they be
planted at intervals of half that distance for the pur-
pose of destroying alternate trees, as their growth
makes the removal necessary."

The entrance-gates should not be visible from the
mansion, Repton says, unless it opens into a court-
yard. As to their position, the gates may be formed
at the junction of two roads, or where a cross-road
comes on to the main road, or where the gates are
sufficiently back from the public road to allow a
carriage to stand clear. The gates, as well as the
lodge, should be at right angles to the drive, and
belong to it, not to the public road. Where the
house and estate are of moderate size, architectural,
rather than " rustic," simplicity best suits the cha-
racter of the lodge. It is desirable, remarks Mr.
Milner, to place the entrance, if it can be managed,

* Milner's "Art and Practice of Landscape-Gardening," p. 13, 14.

140 GARDEN-CRAFT.

at the foot of a hill or rise in the public road, and
not part of the way up an ascent, or at the top of it.

If possible, the house should stand on a platform
or terraced eminence, so as to give the appearance of
being well above ground ; or it should be on a knoll
where a view may be had. The ground-level of the
house should be of the right height to command the
prospect. Should the architect be so fortunate as to
obtain a site for his house where the ground rises
steep and abrupt on one side of the house, he will
get here a series of terraces, rock-gardens, a fernery,
a rose-garden, &c. The ideal site for a house would
have fine prospects to the south-east and to the south-
west. " The principal approach should be on the
north-western face, the offices on the north-eastern
side, the stables and kitchen-garden beyond. The
pleasure-gardens should be on the south-eastern
aspect, with a continuation towards the east ; the
south-western face might be open to the park "
(Milner).

If it can be avoided, the house should not be
placed where the ground slopes towards it — a treat-
ment which suggests water draining into it — but if
this position be for some sufficient reason inevitable,
or should it be an old house with this defect that we
are called to treat, then a good space should be
excavated, at least of the level of the house, with a
terrace-wall at the far end, on the original level of
the site at that particular point. And as to the rest
of the ground, Repton's sound advice is, to plant up
the heights so as to increase the effect of shelter and

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 141

seclusion that the house naturally has, and introduce
water, if available, at the low-level of the site. The
air of seclusion that the low-lying situation gives to
the house is thus intensified by crowning the heights
with wood and setting water at the base of the
slope.

The hanging-gardens at Clevedon Court afford a
good example of what can be done by a judicious
formation of ground where the house is situated near
the base of a slope, and this example is none the less
interesting for its general agreement with Lamb's
'l Blakesmoor " — its ample pleasure-garden " rising
backwards from the house in triple terraces ;
the verdant quarters backwarder still, and stretching
still beyond in old formality, the firry wilderness,
the haunt of the squirrel and the day-long murmur-
ing wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the
centre."

Before dealing with the garden and its relation to
the house it may be well to say a few words upon
Planting. Trees are among the grandest and most
ornamental effects of natural scenery ; they help the
charm of hill, plain, valley, and dale, and the changes
in the colour of their foliage at the different seasons
of the year give us perpetual delight. One of the
most important elements in ornamental garden is
the dividing up and diversifying a given area by
plantations, by grouping of trees to form retired
glades, open lawns, shaded alleys, and well-selected
margins of woods ; and, if this be skilfully done, an
impression of variety and extent will be produced

142 GARDEN-CRAFT.

beyond the belief of the uninitiated who has seen the
bare site before it was planted.

To speak generally, there should be no need of
apology for applying the most subtle art in the dis-
posal of trees and shrubs, and in the formation of the
ground to receive them. " All Art" as Loudon truly
says (speaking upon this very point), " to be acknow-
ledged as Art, must be avowed." This is the case in
the fine arts — there is no attempt to conceal art in
music, poetry, painting, or sculpture, none in archi-
tecture, and none in geometrical-gardening.

In modern landscape-gardening, practised as a
fine art, many of the more important beauties and
effects produced by the artist depend on the use he
makes of foreign trees and shrubs ; and, personally,
one is ready to forgive Brown much of his vile
vandalism in old-fashioned gardens for the use he
makes of cedars, pines, planes, gleditschias, robinias,
deciduous cypress, and all the foreign hardy trees
and shrubs that were then to his hand.

Loudon — every inch a fine gardener, true lineal de-
scendant of Bacon in the art of gardening — recom-
mends in his " Arboretum" (pp. ji, 12) the heading
down of large trees of common species, and the graft-
ing upon them foreign species of the same genus, as is
done in orchard fruit-trees. Hawthorn hedges, for
instance, are common everywhere; why not graft some
of the rare and beautiful sorts of tree thorns, and in-
tersperse common thorns between them ? There are
between twenty and thirty beautiful species and
varieties of thorn in our nurseries. Every gardener

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 143

can graft and bud. Or why should not scarlet oak
and scarlet acer be grafted on common species of
these genera along the margins of woods and planta-
tions ?

In planting, the gardener has regard for character
of foliage and tints, the nature of the soil, the un-
dulations of ground and grouping, the amount of
exposure. Small plantations of trees surrounded by
a fence are the best expedients to form groups, says
Repton, because trees planted singly seldom grow
well. Good trees should not be encumbered by ped-
dling bushes, but be treated as specimens, each having
its separate mound. The mounds can be formed out
of the hollowed pathways in the curves made be-
tween the groups. The dotting of trees over the
ground or of specimen shrubs on a lawn is destruc-
tive of all breadth of effect. This is not to follow
Nature, nor Art, for Art demands that each feature
shall have relation to other features, and all to the
general effect.

In planting trees the variety of height in their
outline must be considered as much as the variety of
their outline on plan ; the prominent parts made
high, the intervening bays kept low,* and this both
in connection with the lie of the ground and the
plant selected. Uniform curves, such as parts of
circles or ovals, are not approved ; better effects are
obtained by forming long bays or recesses with forked

" One deep recess, one bold prominence, has more effect than
twenty little irregularities." " Every variety in the outline of a wood
must be a prominence or a recess" (Repton, p. 182).

144 GARDEN-CRAFT.

tongues breaking forward irregularly, the turf run-
ning into the bays. Trees may serve to frame a
particular view and frame a picture ; and when well
led up to the horizon will enhance the imaginative
effect of a place : a beyond in any view implies
somewhere to explore.

All trees grow more luxuriantly in valleys than on
the hills, and on this account the tendency of tree-
growth is to neutralise the difference in the rise and fall
of the ground and to bring the tops of the trees level.
But the perfection of planting is to get an effect ap-
proximating as near as may be to the charming un-
dulations of the Forest of Dean and the New Forest.
Care will be taken, then, not to plant the fast-grow-
ing, or tall-growing trees in the low-ground, but on
the higher points, and even to add to the irregularity
by clothing the natural peaks with silver fir, whose
tall heads will increase the sense of height. The
limes, planes, and elms will be mostly kept to the
higher ground, bunches of Scotch fir will be placed
here and there, and oaks and beeches grouped to-
gether, while the lower ground will be occupied by
maples, crabs, thorns, alders, &c. " Fringe the edges
of your wood with lines of horse-chestnut," says
Viscount Lymington in his delightful and valuable
article on "Vert and Venery" — "a mass in spring of
blossom, and in autumn of colour; and under these
chestnuts, and in nooks and corners, thrust in some
laburnum, that it may push its showers of gold out
to the light and over the fence."

As to the nature of the soil, and degree of expo-

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 145

sure suitable to different forest-trees, the writer just
quoted holds that, for exposure to the wind inland,
the best trees for all soils are the beech, the Austrian
pine, and the Scotch fir.

For exposure in hedgerows, the best tree to plant
ordinarily is the elm. For exposure to frost, the
Insignis pine, which will not, however, stand the frosts
of the valley, but prefers high ground. For expo-
sure to smoke, undoubtedly the best tree is the
Western plane. The sycamore will stand better than
most trees the smoke and chemical works of manu-
facturing towns. For sea-exposure, the best trees
to plant are the goat willow and pineaster. Among
the low-growing shrubs which stand sea-exposure
well are mentioned the sea-buckthorn, the snow-
berry, the evergreen barberry, and the German
tamarisk ; to which should be added the euonymus
and the escallonia.

With regard to the nature of the soil, Lord
Lymington says : " Strong clay produces the best
oaks and the best silver fir. A deep loam is the most
favourable soil for the growth of the Spanish chestnut
and ash. The beech is the glorious weed of the chalk
and down countries ; the elm of the rich red sand-
stone valleys. Coniferous trees prefer land of a
light sandy texture ; . . . but as many desire to
plant conifers on other soils, I would mention that
the following among others will grow on most soils,
chalk included : the Abies excelsa, canadensis, mag-
nifica, nobilis, and Pinsapo ; the Pinus excelsa, insignis,
and Laricio ; the Cupressus Lawsoniana, erecta, viridis,

146 GARDEN-CRAFT.

and macrocarpa ; the Salisburia adiantifolia, and the
Wellingtonia. The most fast-growing in England of
conifers is the Douglas fir. . . It grows luxuriantly
on the slopes of the hills, but will not stand exposure
to the wind, and for that reason should always be
planted in sheltered combes with other trees behind it.

"In moist and boggy land the spruce or the willow
tribes succeed best.

"In high, poor, and very dry land, no tree thrives
so well as the Scotch fir, the beech, and the
sycamore."

Avoid the selfishness and false economy of
planting an inferior class of fast-growing trees such
as firs and larches and Lombardy poplars, on the
ground that one would not live to get any pleasure
out of woods of oaks and beech and chestnut.
How frequently one seas tall, scraggy planes, or
belts of naked, attenuated firs, where groups of oaks
and elms and groves of chestnut might have stood
with greater advantage.

Avoid the thoughtlessness and false economy
of not thoroughly preparing the ground before
planting. "Those that plant," says an old writer,
"should make their ground fit for the trees before
they set them, and not bury them in a hole like a
dead dog ; let them have good and fresh lodgings
suitable to their quality, and good attendance also,
to preserve them from their enemies till they are
able to encounter them."

Avoid trees near a house ; they tend to make it
damp, and the garden which is near the house un-

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 147

tidy. Writers upon planting have their own ideas
as to the fitness of certain growths for a certain
style of house. As regards the relation of trees to
the house, if the building be of Gothic design with
the piquant outline usual to the style, then trees of
round shape form the best foil ; if of Classic or
Renascence design, then trees of vertical conic
growth suit best. So, if the house be of stone,
trees of dark foliage best meet the case ; if of brick,
trees of lighter foliage should prevail. As a backing
to the horizontal line of a roof to an ordinary two-
storey building, nothing looks better than the long
stems of stone pines or Scotch firs ; and pines are
health-giving trees.

Never mark the outline of ground, nor the
shape of groups of trees and shrubs with formal
rows of bedding plants or other stiff edging, which
is the almost universal practice of gardeners in the
present day. This is a poor travesty of Bacon's
garden, who only allows low things to grow natur-
ally up to the edges.

From the artist's point of view, perhaps the
most desirable quality to aim at in the distribution
of garden space is that of breadth of effect — in other
words, simplicity ; and the larger the garden the
more need does there seem for getting this quality.
One may, in a manner, toy with a small garden. In
the case of a large garden, where the owner in his
greed for prettiness has carried things further than
regulation-taste would allow, much may be done to
subdue the assertiveness of a multiplicity of inter-

L 2

[48 GARDEN-CRAFT.

esting objects by architectural adjuncts — broad
terraces, well-defined lines, even a range of sentinel
yews or clipt shrubs — things that are precise, grave,
calm, and monotonous. Where such things are
brought upon the scene, a certain spaciousness and
amplitude of effect ensues as a matter of course.

One sees that the modern gardener, with his
augmented list of specimen-plants of varied foliage,
is far more apt to err in the direction of sensa-
tionalism than the gardener of old days who was
exempt from many of our temptations. Add to this
power of attaining sweetness and intricacy the
artist's prone aspirations to work up to his lights
and opportunities, and we have temptation which
is seductiveness itself !

The garden at Highnam Court, dear to me for its
signs and memories of my late accomplished friend,
Mr. T. Gambier Parry, is the perfectest modern
garden I have ever seen. But here, if there be a
fault, it is that Art has been allowed to blossom too
profusely. The attention of the visitor is never
allowed to drop, but is ever kept on the stretch.
You are throughout too much led by the master's
cunning hand. Every known bit of garden-artifice,
every white lie of Art, every known variety of choice
tree or shrub, or trick of garden-arrangement is set
forth there. But somehow each thing strikes you as
a little vainglorious — too sensible of its own impor-
tance. We go about in a sort of pre-Raphaelite
frame of mind, where each seemly and beauteous
feature has so much to say for itself that, in the

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 149

delightfulness of the details, we are apt to forget
that it is the first business of any work of Art to be
a unit. There is nothing of single specimen, or
group of intermingled variety, or adroit vista that
we may miss and not be a loser ; the only draw-
back is that we see what we are expected to
see, what everyone else sees. Here is greenery
of every hue ; every metallic tint of silver, gold,
copper, bronze is there ; and old and new favour-
ites take hands, and we feel that it is perfect ;
but the things blush in their conscious beauty — every
prospect is best seen "there!" England has few
such beautiful gardens as Highnam, and it has all the
pathos of the touch of "a vanished hand," and ideals
that have wider range now.

As to this matter of scenic effects, it is of course
only fair to remember that a garden is a place meant
not only for broad vision, but for minute scrutiny ;
and, specially near the house, intricacy is permissible.
Yet the counsels of perfection would tell the artist
to eschew such prettiness and multiplied beauties as
trench upon broad dignity. Sweetness is not good
everywhere. Variations in plant-life that are over-
enforced, like variations in music, may be inferior to
the simple theme. A commonplace house, with
well-disposed grounds, flower-beds in the right place,
a well-planted lawn, may please longer than a fine
pile where is ostentation and unrelieved artifice.

Of lawns. Everything in a garden, we have said,
has its first original in primal Nature : a garden is
made up of wild things that are tamed. The old masters

ISO GARDEN-CRAFT.

fully realised this. They sucked out the honey of
wild things without carrying refinement too far
before they sipped it ; and in garnering for their
House Beautiful the rustic flavour is left so far as was
compatible with the requirements of Art — " as much
as may be to a natural wildness." And it were well
for us to do the same in the treatment of a lawn,
which is only the grassy, sun-chequered, woodland glade
in, or between woods, in a wild country, idealised.

A lawn is one of the delights of man. The
" Teutonic races " — says Mr. Charles Dudley Warner,
in his large American way — " The Teutonic races all
love turf; they emigrate in the line of its growth."
Flower-beds breed cheerfulness, but they may at
times be too gay for tired eyes and jaded minds ;
they may provoke admiration till they are provoking.
But a garden-lawn is a vision of peace, and its
tranquil grace is a boon of unspeakable value to
people doomed to pass their working-hours in the
hustle of city-life.

The question of planting and of lawn-making
runs together, and Nature admonishes us how to set
about this work. Every resource she offers should be
met by the resources of Art : avoid what she avoids,
accept and heighten what she gives. Nature in the
wild avoids half-circles and ovals and uniform curves,
and they are bad in the planted park, both for trees
and greensward. Nature does not of herself dot
the landscape over with spies sent out single-handed
to show the nakedness of the land, but puts forth
detachments that befriend each the other, the boldest

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 151

and fittest first, in jagged outlines, leading the way,
but not out of touch with the rest. And, since
the modern landscape-gardener is nothing if not a
naturalist, this is why one cannot see the consistency
of so fine a master as Mr. Marnock, when he dots his
lawns over with straggling specimens. (See the
model garden, by Mr. Marnock in " The English
Flower-Garden," p. xxi., described thus — " Here
the foreground is a sloping lawn; the flowers are
mostly arranged near the kitchen garden, partly
shown to right ; the hardy ones grouped and scat-
tered in various positions near, or within good view of,
the one bold walk which sweeps round the ground.")

A garden is ground knit up artistically ; ground
which has been the field of artistic enterprise ;
ground which expresses the feeling of beauty and
which absorbs qualities which man has discovered in
the woodland world. And the qualities in Nature
which may well find room in a garden are peace,
variety, animation. A good sweep of lawn is a peaceful
object, but see that the view is not impeded with
the modern's sprawling pell-mell beds. And in the
anxiety to make the most of your ground, do not
spoil a distant prospect. Remember, too, that a
lawn requires a good depth of soil, or it will look
parched in the hot weather.

And since a lawn is so delightful a thing, beware
lest your admiration of it lead you to swamp your
whole ground with grass even to carrying it up to
the house itself. " Nothing is more a child of Art
than a garden," says, Sir Walter, and he was

152 GARDEN-CRAFT.

competent to judge. If only out of compliment to
your architect and to the formal angularities of his
building, let the ground immediately about the house
be of an ornamental dressed character.

Avoid the misplaced rusticity of the fashionable
landscape-gardener, who with his Nebuchadnezzar
tastes would turn everything into grass, would cart
away the terrace and all its adjuncts, do away with
all flowers, and " lawn your hundred good acres
of wheat," as Repton says, if you will only let him,
and if you have them.

In his devotion to grass, his eagerness to display
the measure of his art in the curves of shrubberies
and the arrangement of specimen plants that strut
across your lawn or dot it over as the Sunday
scholars do the croft when they come for their
annual treat, he quite forgets the flowers — forgets the
old intent of a garden as the House Beautiful of the
civilised world — the place for nature-rapture, colour-
pageantry, and sweet odours. " Here the foreground
is a sloping lawn ; the flowers are mostly arranged
near the kitchen garden" Anywhere, anywhere out
of the wray ! Or if admitted at all into view of the
house, it shall be with little limited privileges, and
the stern injunction—

" If you speak you must not show your face,
Or if you show your face you must not speak."

So much for the garden-craft of the best modern
landscape-gardener and its relation to flowers. If
this be the garden of the " Gardenesque " style, as
it is proudly called, I personally prefer the garden
without the style.

153

CHAPTER VII.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING (continued).

" I cannot think Nature is so spent and decayed that she can bring
forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, like
herself ; and when she collects her strength is abler still. Men are
decayed, and studies ; she is not."— BEN JONSON.

THE old-fashioned country house has, almost in-
variably, a garden that curtseys to the house, with
its formal lines, its terraces, and beds of geometrical
patterns.

But to the ordinary Landscape-gardener the
terrace is as much anathema as the " Kist o'
whistles " to the Scotch Puritan ! So able and dis-
tinguished a gardener as Mr. Robinson, while not
absolutely forbidding any architectural acessories or
geometrical arrangement, is for ever girding at them.
The worst thing that can be done with a true garden,
he says (" The English Flower Garden," p. ii), "is to
introduce any feature which, unlike the materials of
our world-designer, never changes. There are posi-
tions, it is true, where the intrusion of architecture and
embankment into the garden is justifiable ; nay, now
and then, even necessary."

If one is to promulgate opinions that shall run
counter to the wisdom of the whole civilised world,
it is, of course, well that they should be pronounced

154 GARDEN-CRAFT.

with the air of a Moses freshly come down from the
Mount, with the tables of the law in his hands. And
there is more of it. " There is no code of taste rest-
ing on any solid foundation which proves that garden
or park should have any extensive stonework or
geometrical arrangement. . . . Let us, then, use
as few oil-cloth or carpet patterns and as little stone-
work as possible in our gardens. The style is in
doubtful taste in climates and positions more suited
to it than that of England, but he who would adopt
it in the present day is an enemy to every true
interest of the garden " (p. vi).

So much for the " deadly formalism " of an old-
fashioned garden in our author's eyes ! But, as
Horace Walpole might say, "it is not peculiar to Mr.
Robinson to think in that manner." It is the way of
the landscape-gardener to monopolise to himself all
the right principles of gardening ; he is the angel of
the garden who protects its true interests; all other
moods than his are low, all figures other than his are
symbols of errors, all dealings with Nature or with
" the materials of our world-designer" other than his
are spurious. For the colonies I can imagine no fitter
doctrines than our author's, but not for an old land
like ours, and for methods that have the approval of
men like Bacon, Temple, More, Evelyn, Sir Joshua,
Sir Walter, Elia, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Morris,
and Jefferies. And, even in the colonies, they might
demand to see " the code of taste resting on any
solid foundation which proves " that you shall have
any garden or park at all !

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 155

"If I am to have a system at all," says the
author of " The Flower Garden" (Murray, 1852)
whose broad-minded views declare him to be an
amateur, " give me the good old system of terraces and
angled walks, the clipt yew hedges, against whose
dark and rich verdure the bright old-fashioned
flowers glittered in the sun." Or again: " Of all
the vain assumptions of these coxcomical times, that
which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science
of gardening is the vainest. . . . The real
beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts
after rarity. If we review the various styles that
have prevailed in England from the knotted gardens
of Elizabeth ... to the landscape fashion of
the present day, we shall have little reason to pride
ourselves on the advance which national taste has
made upon the earliest efforts in this department "
("The Praise of Gardens," p. 270).

"Large or small," says Mr. W. Morris, "the
garden should look both orderly and rich. It
should be well fenced from the outer world. It
should by no means imitate either the wilful-
ness or the wildness of Nature, but should look
like a thing never seen except near a house "
(" Hopes and Fears ").

The whole point of the matter is, however, per-
haps best summed up in Hazlitt's remark, that there
is a pleasure in Art which none but artists feel. And
why this sudden respect for " the materials of our
world-designer," when we may ask in Repton's
words "why this art has been called Landscape-

156 GARDEN-CRAFT.

gardening, perhaps he who gave the title may
explain. I see no reason, unless it be the efficacy
which it has shown in destroying landscapes, in
which indeed it is infallible ! " But, setting aside the
transparent shallowness of such a plea against the
use of Art in a garden, it argues little for the
scheme of effects to leave " nothing to impede the
view of the house or its windows but a refreshing
carpet of grass." To pitch your house down upon the
grass with no architectural accessories about it, to
link it to the soil, is to vulgarise it, to rob it of im-
portance, to give it the look of a pastoral farm, green
to the door-step. To bring Nature up to the win-
dows of your house, with a scorn of art-sweetness,
is not only to betray your own deadness to form, but
to cause a sense of unexpected blankness in the
visitor's mind on leaving the well-appointed interior
of an English home. As the house is an Art-produc-
tion, so is the garden that surrounds it, and there is
no code of taste that I know of which would prove
that Art is more reprehensible in the garden than in
the house.

But to return. The old-fashioned country house
had its terraces. These terraces are not mere narrow
slopes of turf, such as now-a-days too often answer
to the term, but they are of solid masonry with
balustrades or open-work that give an agreeable
variety of light and shade, and impart an air of im-
portance and of altitude to the house that would be
lacking if the terrace were not there.

The whole of the ground upon which the house

'f T 'V

(Perspective view.)

No. 1. Plan of Rosery with Sundial.

Perspective view of Garden in Plan No. 1

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 157

stands, or which forms its base, constitutes the ter-
race. In such cases the terrace-walls are usually in
two or more levels, the upper terrace being mostly
parallel with the line of the house, or bowed out at
intervals with balconies, while the lower terrace, or
terraces, serve as the varying levels of formal gar-
dens, pleasure-grounds, labyrinths, &c. The terraces
are approached by wide steps that are treated in a
stately and impressive manner. The walls and
balustrades, moreover, conform, as they should, to
the materials employed in the house ; if the house be
of stone, as at Haddon, or Brympton, or Claverton,
the balustrade is of stone ; if the house be of brick,
as at Hatfield or Bramshill, the walls and balustrades
will be of brick and terra-cotta. The advantage of
this agreement of material is obvious, for house and
terrace, embraced at one glance, make a consistent
whole. There is not, of course, the same necessity
for consistency of material in the case of the mere
retaining walls.

As one must needs have a system in planning
grounds, there is none that will more certainly bring
honour and effect to them than the regular geome-
trical treatment. This is what the architect naturally
prefers. The house is his child, and he knows what
is good for it. Unlike the imported gardener, who
comes upon the scene as a foreign agent, the architect
works from the house outwards, taking the house as
his centre ; the other works from the outside inwards,
if he thinks of the " inwards" at all. The first
thinks of house and grounds as a whole which shall

158 GARDEN-CRAFT.

embrace the main buildings, the out-buildings, the
flower and kitchen -gardens, terraces, walls, fore-
court, winter-garden, conservatory, fountain, steps,
&c. The other makes the house common to the
commonplace ; owing no allegiance to Art, a specialist
of one idea, he holds that the worst thing that can
be done is to intrude architectural or geometrical
arrangement about a garden, and speaks of a re-
freshing carpet of grass as preferable.

As to the extent, number, and situation of ter-
races, this point is determined by the conditions of
the house and site. Terraces come naturally if the
house be on an eminence, but even in cases where
the ground recedes only to a slight extent, the
surface of a second terrace may be lowered by in-
creasing the fall of the slope till sufficient earth is
provided for the requisite filling. The surplus earth
dug out in forming the foundations and cellars of the
house, or rubbish from an old building, will help to
make up the terrace levels and save the cost of
wheeling and carting the rubbish away.

Like all embankments, terrace walls are built
with " battered " fronts or outward slope ; the back
of the wall will be left rough, and well drained. A
backing of sods, Mr. Milner says, will prevent thrust,
and admit of a lessened thickness in the wall. The
walls should not be less than three feet in height
from the ground-level beneath, exclusive of the
balustrade, which is another three feet high.

The length of the terrace adds importance to the
house, and in small gardens, where the kitchen-

n

n

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 159

garden occupies one side of the flower-garden, the
terrace may with advantage be carried to the full
extent of the ground, and the kitchen-garden separ-
ated by a hedge and shrubs; and at the upper end of
the kitchen-garden may be a narrow garden, geome-
trical, rock, or other garden set next the terrace
wall.

The treatment of the upper terrace should be
strictly architectural. If the terrace be wide, raised
beds with stone edging, set on the inner side of the
terrace, say alternately long beds with dwarf flower-
ing shrubs or hydrangeas, and circles with standard
hollies, or marble statues on pedestals, that shall
alternate with pyramidal golden yews, have a good
effect, the terrace terminating with an arbour or
stone Pavilion. Modern taste, however, even if it
condescend so far as to allow of a terrace, is content
with its grass plot and gravel walks, which is not
carrying Art very far.

Laneham tells of the old pleasaunce at Kenilworth,
that it had a terrace 10 ft. high and 12 ft. wide on
the garden side, in which were set at intervals obelisks
and spheres and white bears, " all of stone, upon their
curious bases," and at each end an arbour ; the
garden-plot was below this, and had its fair alleys,
or grass, or gravel.

The lower terrace may well be twice the width of
the upper one, and may be a geometrical garden laid
out on turf, if preferred, but far better upon gravel.
Here will be collected the choicest flowers in the
garden, giving a mass of rich colouring.

160 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Although in old gardens the lower terrace is
some 10 ft. below the upper one, this is too deep to
suit modern taste ; indeed, 5 ft. or 6 ft. will give a
better view of the garden if it is to be viewed from
the house. At the same time it is undeniable that
the more you are able to look down upon the garden
— the higher you stand above its plane — the better
the effect ; the lower you stand, the poorer the per-
spective.

Modern taste, also, will not always tolerate a
balustraded wall as a boundary to the terrace, but
likes a grass slope. If this poor substitute be pre-
ferred, there should be a level space at the bottom
of the slope and at the top ; the slope should have a
continuous line, and not follow any irregularity in
the natural lie of the ground, and there should be a
simple plinth 12 to 18 in. high at the bottom of the
slope.

But the mere grass slope does not much help the
effect of the house, far or near ; a house standing
on a grass slope always has the effect of sliding
down a hill. To leave the house exposed upon the
landscape, unscreened and unterraced, is not to treat
site or house fairly. There exists a certain necessity
for features in a flat place, and if no raised terrace
be possible, it is desirable to get architectural treat-
ment by means of balustrades alone, without much,
or any, fall in the ground. The eye always asks for
definite boundaries to a piece of ornamental ground as
it does for a frame to a picture, and where definite
boundaries do not exist, the distant effect is that of a

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THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 161

house that has tumbled casually down from the
skies, near which the cattle may graze as they list,
and the flower-beds are the mere sport of contin-
gencies.

Good examples of terrace walls are to be found
at Haddon, Claverton, Brympton, Montacute, Brams-
hill, Wilton, and Blickling Hall. If truth be told,
however, all our English examples dwindle into
nothingness by the side of fine Italian examples like
those at Villa Albani,* Villa Medici, or Villa Borghese,
with their grand scope and array of sculpture. (See
illustration from Percier and Fontaine's " Choix des
plus celebres maisons de plaisance de Rome et de ses
environs" Paris, MDCCCIX.)

The arrangements of steps is a matter that may
call forth a man's utmost ingenuity. The scope and
variety of step arrangement is, indeed, a matter that
can only be realised by designers who have given it
their study. As to practical points. In planning
steps make the treads wide, the risers low. Long
flights without landings are always objectionable.
Some of the best examples, both in England and
abroad, have winders ; as to the library quadrangle,
Trinity Coll., Cambridge ; Donibristle Castle, Scot-
land ; Villa d'Este, Tivoli ; the gardens at Nimes.
The grandest specimen of all is the Trinita di Monte
steps in Rome (see Notes on Gardens in The British
Architect, by John Belcher and Mervyn Macartney).

It is impossible to lay down rules of equal appli-
cation everywhere as to the distribution of garden

* See accompanying plans.

M

162 GARDEN-CRAFT.

area into compartments, borders, terraces, walks, &c.
These matters are partly regulated by the character
of the house, its situation, the section and outline of
the ground. But gardens should, if possible, lie
towards the best parts of the house, or towards the
rooms most commonly in use by the family, and
endeavour should be made to plant them so that to
step from the house on to the terrace, or from the
terrace to the various parts of the gardens, should
only seem like going from one room to another.

Of the arrangement of the ground into divisions,
each section should have its own special attractive-
ness and should be led up to by some inviting
artifice of archway, or screened alley of shrubs, or
" rosery " with its trellis-work, or stone colonnade ;
and if the alley be long it should be high enough to
afford shade from the glare of the sun in hot weather ;
you ought not, as Bacon pertinently sa}Ts, to " buy
the shade by going into the sun."

Again, the useful and the beautiful should be
happily united, the kitchen and the flower garden,
the way to the stables and outbuildings, the orchard,
the winter garden, &c., all having a share of con-
sideration and a sense of connectedness ; and if
there be a chance for a filbert walk, seize it ; that at
Hatfield is charming. " I cannot understand," says
Richard Jefferies (" Wild Life in a Southern County,"
p. 70), " why filbert walks are not planted by our
modern capitalists, who make nothing of spending
a thousand pounds in forcing-houses."

A garden should be well fenced, and there should

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 163

always be facility for getting real seclusion, so much
needed now-a-days ; indeed, the provision of
places of retreat has always been a note of an
English garden. The love of retirement, almost as
much as a taste for trees and flowers, has dictated
its shapes. Hence the *cedar-walks, the bower,
the avenue, the maze, the alley, the wilderness, that
were familiar, and almost the invariable features of
an old English pleasaunce, " hidden happily and
shielded safe."

This seclusion can be got by judicious screen-
ing of parts, by shrubberies, or avenues of
hazel, or yew, or sweet-scented bay, with perhaps
clusters of lilies and hollyhocks, or dwarf Alpine
plants and trailers between. And in all this the true
gardener will have a thought for the birds. " No
modern exotic evergreens," says Jefferies, " ever
attract our English birds like the true old English
trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to
build ; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with
vacant draughty spaces underneath, they detest,
avoiding them as much as possible. The common
hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall
contain three times as many nests, and be visited by
five times as many birds as the foreign evergreens,
so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the
first old-fashioned frost."

* One of the finest and weirdest cedar-walks that I have ever
met with is that at Harwell, near Owslebury in Hampshire. Here
you realize the wizardry of green gloom and sense of perfect seclusion.
It was here that Henry VIII. courted one of his too willing wives.

M 2

i64 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Another chance for getting seclusion is the high
walls or lofty yew hedge of the quadrangular court-
yard, which may be near the entrance. Such a fore-
court is the place for a walk on bleak days ; in its
borders you are sure of the earliest spring flowers,
for the tender flowers can here bloom securely, the
myrtle, the pomegranate will flourish, and the most
fragrant plants and climbers hang over the door and
windows. What is more charming than the effect
of hollyhocks, peonies, poppies, tritomas, and tulips
seen against a yew hedge ?

The paths should be wide and excellently made.
The English have always had good paths ; as Mr.
Evelyn said to Mr. Pepys, " We have the best walks
of gravell in the world, France having none, nor
Italy." The comfort and the elegance of a garden
depend in no slight degree upon good gravel walks,
but having secured gravel walks to all parts of the
grounds, green alleys should also be provided.
Nothing is prettier than a vista through the smooth-
shaven green alley, with a statue or sundial or
pavilion at the end ; or an archway framing a peep
of the country beyond.

As to the garden's size, it is erroneous to suppose
that the enjoyments of a garden are only in propor-
tion to its magnitude ; the pleasurableness of a
garden depends infinitely more upon the degree of
its culture and the loving care that is bestowed upon
it. If gardens were smaller than they usually are,
there would be a better chance of their orderly
keeping. As it is, gardens are mostly too large for

HI ini IBH

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 165

the number of attendants, so that the time and care
of the gardener are nearly absorbed in the manual
labour of repairing and stocking the beds, and
maintaining and sweeping the walks.

But if not large, the grounds should not have
the appearance of being confined within a limited
space ; and Art is well spent in giving an effect of
greater extent to the place than it really possesses by
a suitable composition of the walks, bushes, and trees.
These lines should lead the eye to the distance, and
if bounded by trees, the garden should be connected
with the outer world by judicious openings ; and
this rule applies to gardens large or small.

Ground possessing a gentle inclination towards
the south is desirable for a garden. On such a slope
effectual drainage is easily accomplished, and the
greatest possible benefit obtained from the sun's
rays. The garden should, if possible, have an open
exposure towards the east and west, so that it may
enjoy the full benefit of morning and evening sun ;
but shelter on the north or north-east, or any side
in which the particular locality may happen to be
exposed, is desirable.

The dimensions of the garden will be proportionate
to the scale of the house. The general size of the
garden to a good-sized house is from four to six
acres, but the extent varies in many places from
twelve to twenty, or even thirty acres. (See an
admirable article on gardening in the " Encyclopaedia."

Before commencing to lay out a garden the plan
should be prepared in minute detail, and every point

166 GARDEN-CRAFT.

carefully considered. Two or three acres of kitchen
garden, enclosed by walls and surrounded by slips,
will suffice for the supply of a moderate establish-
ment.* The form of the kitchen garden advocated
by the writer in the ''Encyclopaedia" is that of a square,
or oblong, not curvilinear, since the work of cropping
of the ground can thus be more easily carried out.
On the whole, the best form is that of a parallelogram,
with its longest sides in the proportion of about five
to three of the shorter, and running east and west.
The whole should be compactly arranged so as to
facilitate working, and to afford convenient access
for the carting of heavy materials to the store-
yards, etc.

There can, as we have said, be no fixed or uniform
arrangement of gardens. Some grounds will have
more flower-beds than others, some more park or
wilderness; some will have terraces, some not; some
a pinetum, or an American garden. In some gardens
the terraces will lie immediately below the main front
of the house, in others not, because the geometrical
garden needs a more sheltered site where the
flowers can thrive.

* As the walls afford valuable space for the growth of the choicer
kinds of hardy fruits, the direction in which they are built is of con-
siderable importance. "In the warmer parts of the country, the wall
on the north side of the garden should be so placed as to face the sun
at about an hour before noon, or a little to east of south ; in less
favoured localities it should be made to face direct south, and in the
still more unfavourable districts it should face the sun an hour after
noon, or a little west of south. The east and west walls should
run parallel to each other, and at right angles to that on the north
side."

(Perspective view.)

No, 2. Plan of Sunk Flower Garden and Yew Hedges.

'>

I

*

<D

a

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 167

Of the shapes of the beds it were of little avail
to speak, and the diagrams here given are only of use
where the conditions of the ground properly admit
of their application. The geometrical garden is
capable of great variety of handling. A fair size for
a geometrical garden is 1 20 ft. by 60 ft. This size
will allow of a main central walk of seven feet that
shall divide the panel into two equal parts and lead
down to the next level. The space may have a
balustrade along its length on the two sides, and on
the garden side of the balustrade a flower-bed of
mixed flowers and choice low-growing shrubs, backed
with hollyhocks, tritoma, lilies, golden-rod, etc. The
width of the border will correspond with the space
required for the steps that descend from the upper
terrace. For obtaining pleasant proportions in the
design, the walks in the garden will be of two sizes,
gravelled like the rest — the wider walk, say, three feet,
the smaller one foot nine inches. The centre of the
garden device on each side may be a raised bed with a
stone kerb and an ornamental shrub in the middle, and
the space around with, say, periwinkle or stonecrop,
mixed with white harebells, or low creepers. Or,
should there be no wide main walk, and the garden-
plot be treated as one composition, the central bed will
have a statue, sundial, fountain, or other architectural
feature. Each bed will be edged with box or
chamfered stone, or terra-cotta edging. Or the
formal garden may be sunk below the level of the
paths, and filled either with flowers or with dwarf
coniferse.

168 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Both for practical and artistic reasons, the beds
should not be too small; they should not be so small
that, when filled with plants, they should appear like
spots of colour, nor be so large that any part of
them cannot be easily reached by a rake. Nor
should the shapes of the beds be too angular to
accommodate the plants well. In Sir Gardner
Wilkinson's book on " Colour" (Murray, 1858,
p. 372), he speaks of design and good form as the
very soul of a dressed garden ; and the very perma-
nence of the forms, which remain though successive
series of plants be removed, calls for a good design.
The shapes of the beds, as well as the colours of
their contents, are taken cognisance of in estimating
the general effect of a geometrical garden. This
same accomplished author advises that there should
always be a less formal garden beyond the geometri-
cal one ; the latter is, so to speak, an appurtenance
of the house, a feature of the plateau upon which it
stands, and no attempt should be made to combine
the patterns of the geometrical with the beds or
borders of the outer informal garden, such combina-
tion being specially ill-judged in the neighbourhood
of bushes and winding paths.

Of the proper selection of flowers and the deter-
mination of the colours for harmonious combination
in the geometrical beds, much that is contradictory
has been preached, one gardener leaning to more
formality than another. There is, however, a general
agreement upon the necessity of having beds that
will look fairly well at all seasons of the year, and

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 169

an agreement as to the use of hardy flowers in these
beds. Mr. Robinson has some good advice to give
upon this point (" English Flower Garden/' p. 24) :
"The ugliest and most needless parterre (!) in
England may be planted in the most beautiful way
with hardy flowers alone." (Why " needless/' then ?)
" Are we not all wrong in adopting one degree, so to
say, of plant life as the only fitting one to lay before
the house ? Is it well to devote the flower-bed to
one type of vegetation only — low herbaceous vege-
tation— be that hardy or tender ? We have
been so long accustomed to leave flower-beds raw,
and to put a number of plants out every year, form-
ing flat surfaces of colour, that no one even thinks of
the higher and better way of filling them. But
surely it is worth considering whether it would not
be right to fill the beds permanently, rather than to
leave them in this naked or flat condition throughout
the whole of the year. ... If any place asks
for permanent planting, it is the spot of ground im-
mediately near the house ; for no one can wish to
see large, grave-like masses of soil frequently dug
and disturbed near the windows, and few care for
the result of all this, even when the ground is well
covered during a good season." Again our author,
on p. 95, states that " he has very decided notions as
to arrangement of the various colours for summer
bedding, which are that the whole shall be so com-
mingled that one would be puzzled to determine
what tint predominates in the entire arrangement."
He would have a "glaucous" colour, that is, a

i?o GARDEN-CRAFT.

light grey or whitish green. Such a colour never
tires the eye, and harmonises with the tints of the
landscape, " particularly of the lawn." This seems
to be neutralising the effects of the flowers, and this
primal consideration of the lawn is like scorning your
picture for the sake of its frame !

Sir Gardner Wilkinson, who writes of gardens
from quite another point of view, says : " It is by no
means necessary or advisable to select rare flowers
for the beds, and some of the most common are the
most eligible, being more hardy, and therefore less
likely to fail, or to cover the bed with a scanty
and imperfect display of colour. Indeed, it is a
common mistake to seek rare flowers, when many of
the old and most ordinary varieties are far more
beautiful. The point to note in this matter of
choosing flowers for a geometrical garden is to ascer-
tain first the lines that will best accord with the
design, and make for a harmonious and brilliant
effect, and to see that the flowers best suited to it
blossom at the same periods. A succession of those
of the same colour may be made to take the place of
each, and continue the design at successive seasons.
They should also be, as near as possible, of the
same height as their companions, so that the blue
flowers be not over tall in one bed, or the red too
short in another. . . . Common flowers, the
weeds of the country, are often most beautiful in
colour, and are not to be despised because they are
common ; they have also the advantage of being
hardy, and rare flowers are not always those

Perspective view of part of Garden
at " Downes," Hayle.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 171

best suited for beds " (Wilkinson on " Colour,"

P- 375)-

With regard to the ornamental turf-beds of our

modern gardens. To judge of a garden upon high
principles, we expect it to be the finest and fittest
expression that a given plot of ground will take ; it
must be the perfect adaptation of means to an end, and
that end is beauty. Are we to suppose, then, that
the turf-beds of strange device that we meet with in
modern gardens are the best that can be done by the
heir of all the ages in the way of garden-craft ? A
garden, I am aware, has other things to attend to
besides the demands of ideal beauty ; it has to
embellish life to supply innocent pleasure to the
inmates of the house as well as to dignify the house
itself; and the devising of these vagrant beds that
sprawl about the grounds is a pleasure that can be
ill spared from the artistic delights of a modern
householder. It is indeed wonderful to what heights
the British fancy can rise when put to the push, if
only it have a congenial field ! So here we have
flower-beds shaped as crescents and kidneys — beds
like flying bats or bubbling tadpoles, commingled
butterflies and leeches, stars and sausages, hearts and
commas, monograms and maggots — a motley assort-
ment to be sure — but the modern mind is motley,
and the pretty flowers smile a sickly smile out of
their comic beds, as though Paradise itself could pro-
vide them with no fairer lodgings !

And yet if I dare speak my mind " sike fancies
weren foolerie ; " and it were hard to find a good word

172 GARDEN-CRAFT.

to say for them from any point of view whatever.
Theic wobbly shapes are not elegant ; they have
not the sanction of precedent, even of epochs the
most barbarous. And though they make pretence at
being a species of art, their mock-formality has not
that geometric precision which shall bind them to the
formal lines of the house, or to the general bearings
of the site. Not only do they contribute nothing to
the artistic effect of the general design, but they
even mar the appearance of the grass that accom-
modates them. Design they have, but not design
of that quality which alone justifies its intrusion.
No wonder " Nature abhors lines " if this base and
spurious imitation of the " old formality," that
Charles Lamb gloats over, is all that the landscape-
•garden can offer in the way of idealisation.

One other feature of the old-fashioned garden —
the herbaceous border — requires a word. It is
worthy of note that, unlike the modern, the ancient
gardener was not a man of one idea — his art is not
bounded like a barrel-organ that can only play one
invariable tune ! While the master of the " old
formality " can give intricate harmonies of inwoven
colours in the geometric beds — "all mosaic, choicely
planned," where Nature lends her utmost magic to
grace man's fancy — he knows the value of the less
as well as the more, and finds equal room for the
unconstrained melodies of odd free growths in the
border-beds, where you shall enjoy the individual
character, the form, the outline, the colour, the tone
of each plant. Here let the mind of an earlier

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 173

generation speak in George Milner's " Country
Pleasures " :

"By this time I have got round to the old English flower-bed,
where only perennials with an ancient ancestry are allowed to grow.
Here there is always delight ; and I should be sorry to exchange its
sweet flowers for any number of cartloads of scentless bedding-plants,
mechanically arranged and ribbon-bordered. This bed is from fifty
to sixty yards long, and three or four yards in width. A thorn hedge
divides it from the orchard. In spring the apple-bloom hangs
over, and now we see in the background the apples themselves.
The plants still in flower are the dark blue monkshood, which
is 7ft. high ; the spiked veronica ; the meadow-sweet or queen-o'-
the-meadow ; the lady's mantle, and the evening primrose. This last
may be regarded as the characteristic plant of the season. The
flowers open about seven o'clock, and as the twilight deepens, they
gleam like pale lamps, and harmonise wonderfully with the colour of
the sky. On this bed I read the history of the year. Here were the
first snowdrops ; here came the crocuses, the daffodils, the blue gentians,
the columbines, the great globed peonies ; and last, the lilies and the

And now to apply what has been said.

Since gardening entails so much study and ex-
perience— since it is a craft in which one is so apt to
err, in small matters as in large — since it exists to
represent passages of Nature that have touched man's
imagination from time immemorial — since its business
is to paint living pictures of living things whose habits,
aspects, qualities, and character have ever engaged
man's interest — since the modern gardener has not
only not found new sources of inspiration unknown
of old, but has even lost sensibility to some that
were active then — it were surely wise to take the
hand of old garden-masters who did large things in
a larger past — to whom fine gardening came as second
nature — whose success has given English garden-

174 GARDEN-CRAFT.

craft repute which not even the journeyman efforts
of modern times can quite extinguish.

These men — Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, and their
school — let us follow for style, elevated form, noble
ideals, and artistic interpretation of Nature.

For practical knowledge of trees and shrubs,
indigenous or exotic — to know how to plant and what
to plant — to know what to avoid in the practice of
modern blunderers — to know the true theory and
practice of Landscape-gardening, reduced to writing,
after ample analysis — turn we to those books of
solid value of the three great luminaries of modern
garden-craft, Gilpin, Repton, Loudon.

And it were not only to be ungenerous, but
absolutely foolish, to neglect the study of the best
that is now written and done in the way of landscape-
gardening, in methods of planting, and illustration of
botany up to date. One school may see things from
a different point of view to another, yet is there but
one art of gardening. It is certain that to gain bold-
ness in practice, to have clear views upon that
delicate point — the relations of Art and Nature —
to have a reliable standard of excellence, we must
know and value the good in the garden-craft of all
times, must sympathise with the point of view of
each phase, and follow that which is good in each
and all without scruple and doubtfulness. That
man is a fool who thinks that he can escape the
influence of his day, or that he can dispense with
tradition.

I say, let us follow the old garden-masters for

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 175

style, form, ideal, and artistic interpretation of
Nature, and let us not say what Horace Walpole
whimpered forth of Temple's garden-enterprise :
u These are adventures of too hard achievement for
any common hands." Have we not seen that at the
close of Bacon's lessons in grand gardening he adds,
that the things thrown in "for state and magnificence "
are but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden ?

The counsels of perfection are not to be slighted
because our ground is small. In gardening, as in
other matters, the true test of one's work is the
measure of one's possibilities. A small, trim garden,
like a sonnet, may contain the very soul of beauty. A
small garden may be as truly admirable as a perfect
song or painting.

Let it be our aim, then, to give to gardening all
the method and distinctness of which it is capable,
and admit no impediments. A garden not fifty yards
square, deftly handled, judiciously laid out, its beds
and walks suitably directed, will yield thrice the
opportunity for craft, thrice the scope for imaginative
endeavour that a two-acre "garden " of the pastoral-
farm order, such as is recommended of the faculty,
will yield. The very division of the ground into
proportionate parts, the varied levels obtained, the
framed vistas, the fitting architectural adjuncts, will
alone contribute an air of size and scale. As to
" codes of taste " (which are usually in matters of Art
only someone's opinions stated pompously), these
should not be allowed to baulk individual enterprise.
" Long experience," says that accomplished gardener

176 GARDEN-CRAFT.

and charming writer, E. V. B., in " Days and Hours
in a Garden " (p. 125), " Long experience has taught
me to have nothing to do with principles in the
garden. Little else than a feeling of entire sympathy
with the diverse characters of your plants and
flowers is needed for ' Art in a Garden.' If
sympathy be there, all the rest comes naturally
enough." Or to put this thought in Temple's words,
" The success is wholly in the gardener."

If a garden grow flowers in abundance, there
is success, and one may proceed to frame a garden
after approved " codes of taste " and fail in this, or
one may prefer unaccepted methods and find success
beyond one's fondest dreams. " All is fine that is
fit " is a good garden motto ; and what an eclectic
principle is this ! How many kinds of style it
allows, justifies, and guards ! the simplest way or
the most ornate ; the fanciful or the sweet austere ;
the intricate and complex, or the coy and uncon-
strained. Take it as true as Gospel that there is
danger in the use of ornament — danger of excess —
take it as equally true that there is an intrinsic and
superior value in moderation, and yet the born
gardener shall find more paths, old and new, that
lead to Beauty in a plot of garden-ground than the
modern stylist dreams of.

The art of gardening may now be known of all
men. Gardening is no longer a merely princely
diversion requiring thirty wide acres for its display.
Everyone who can, now lives in the country, where
he is bound to have a garden ; and I repeat what I

THE TECHNICS OP GARDENING. 177

said before, let no one suppose that the beauty of a
garden depends on its acreage, or on the amount of
money spent upon it. Nay, one would almost pre-
fer a small garden plot, so as to ensure that ample
justice shall be done to it.* In a small garden there
is less fear of dissipated effort, more chance of mak-
ing friends with its inmates, more time to spare to
heighten the beauty of its effects.

To some extent the success of a garden depends
upon favourable conditions of sun, soil, and water,
but more upon the choiceness of its contents, the
skill of its planting, the lovingness of its tendence.
Love for beauty has a way of enticing beauty ;
the seeing, eye wins its own ranges of vision,
finds points of vantage in unlikely ground. " I
write in a nook," says the poet Cowper, " that I call
my boudoir ; it is a summer-house, not bigger than
a sedan-chair; the door of it opens into the garden
that is now crowded with pinks, roses, and honey-
suckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard.
It formerly served an apothecary as a smoking-room ;
at present, however, it is dedicated to sublimer uses."
What a mastery of life is here !

" As if life's business were a summer mood ;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good ;

By our own spirits are we deified."

But I must not finish the stanza in this connection.

* " Embower a cottage thickly and completely with nothing but
roses, and nobody would desire the interference of another plant."
—LEIGH HUNT.

N

1 78 GARDEN-CRAFT.

A garden is pre-eminently a place to indulge in-
dividual taste. " Let us not be that fictitious thing,"
says Madame Roland, " that can only exist by the
help of others — soyons nous ! " So, regardless of
the doctors, let me say that the best general rule that
I can devise for garden-making'is : put all the beauty
and delightsomeness you can into your garden, get
all the beauty and delight you can out of your garden,
never minding a little mad want of balance, and think
of proprieties afterwards ! Of course, this is to
" prove naething," but never mind if but the garden
enshrine beauty. To say this is by no means to allow
that the garden is the fit place for indulging your
love of the out-of-the-way ; not so, yet a little sign
of fresh motive, a touch of individual technique, a
token, however shyly displayed, that you think for
yourself is welcome in a garden. Thus I know of a
gardener who turned a section of his grounds into a
sort of huge bear-pit, not a sunk pit, but a mound
that took the refuse soil from the site of his new
house hollowed out, and its slopes set all round with
Alpine and American garden-plants, each variety
finding the aspect it likes best, and the proportion of
light and shade that suits its constitution. This is, of
course, to "intrude embankments " into a garden with
a vengeance, yet even Mr. Robinson, if he saw it,
would allow that, as in love and war, your daring in
gardening is justified by its results, where, as George
Herbert has it —

" Who shuts his hand, hath lost its gold ;
Who opens it, hath it twice told."

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 179

A garden is, first and last, a place for flowers ;
but, treading in the old master's footsteps, I would
devote a certain part of even a small garden to
Nature's own wild self, and the loveliness of weed-
life. Here Art should only give things a good start
and help the propagation of some sorts of plants not
indigenous to the locality. Good effects do not
ensue all at once, but stand aside and wait, or help
judiciously, and the result will be a picture of rude
and vigorous life, of pretty colour and glorious form,
that is gratifying for its own qualities, and more for
its opposition to the peacefulness of the garden's
ordered surroundings.

A garden is the place for flowers, a place where
one may foster a passion for loveliness, may learn
the magic of colour and the glory of form, and
quicken sympathy with Nature in her higher moods.
And, because the old-fashioned garden more con-
duces to these ends than the modern, it has our
preference. The spirit of old garden-craft says :
11 Do everything that can be done to help Nature, to
lift things to perfection, to interpret, to give to your
Art method and distinctness." The spirit of the
modern garden-craft of the purely landscape school
says : " Let be, let well alone, or extemporise at
most. Brag of your scorn for Art, yet smuggle her
in, as a stalking-horse for your halting method and
non-geometrical forms."

And, as we have shown, Art has her revenges as
well as Nature ; and the very negativeness of this
school's Art-treatments is the seal to its doom.

N 2

i So GARDEN-CRAFT.

Mere neutral teaching can father nothing; it can
never breed a system of stable device that is capable
of development. But old garden-craft is positive,
where the other is negative ; it has no niggling
scruples, but clear aims, that admit of no impediment
except the unwritten laws of good taste. Hence its
permanent value as a standard of device — for every
gardener must needs desire the support of some
backbone of experience to stiffen his personal efforts
— he must needs have some basis of form on which
to rest his own device, his own realisations of natural
beauty — and what safer, stabler system of garden-
craft can he wish for than that of the old English
garden — itself the outcome of a spacious age, well
skilled in the pictorial art and bent upon perfection ?

The qualities to aim at in a flower-garden are
beauty, animation, variety, mystery. A garden's
beauty, like a woman's beauty, is measured by its
capacity for taking fine dress. Given a fine garden,
and we need not fear to use embellishment or strong
colour, or striking device, according to the adage
"The richly provided richly require."

Because Art stands, so to speak, sponsor for the
grace of a garden, because all gardening is Art or
nothing, we need not fear to overdo Art in a garden,
nor need we fear to make avowal of the secret of its
charm. I have no more scruple in using the scissors
upon tree or shrub, where trimness is desirable, than
I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once
represented a virgin world. There is a quaint charm
in the results of the topiary art, in the prim imagery

(Perspective view.)

No, 6. Plan shewing arrangement of Fountain, Yew Walk, and
Flower Beds for a Large Garden.

THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 181

of evergreens, that all ages have felt. And I would
even introduce bizarreries on the principle of not
leaving all that is wild and odd to Nature outside
of the garden-paling ; and in the formal part of the
garden my yews should take the shape of pyramids
or peacocks or cocked hats or ramping lions in
Lincoln-green, or any other conceit I had a mind to,
which vegetable sculpture can take.

As to the other desirable qualities — animation,
variety, mystery — I would base my garden upon the
model of the old masters, without adopting any
special style. The place should be a home of fancy,
full of intention, full of pains (without showing any);
half common-sense, half romance; "neither praise nor
poetry, but something better than either," as Burke
said of Sheridan's speech ; it should have an ethereal
touch, yet be not inappropriate for the joyous racket
and country cordiality of an English home. It
should be

"A miniature of loveliness, all grace
Summ'd up and closed in little "-

something that would challenge the admiration and
suit the moods of various minds ; be brimful of
colour-gladness, yet be not all pyramids of sweets,
but offer some solids for the solid man ; combining
old processes and new, old idealisms and new real-
isms ; the monumental style of the old here, the
happy-go-lucky shamblings of the modern there ; the
page of Bacon or Temple here, the page of Repton
or Marnock there. At every turn the imagination
should get a fresh stimulus to surprise ; we should

1 82 GARDEN-CRAFT.

be led on from one fair sight, one attractive picture,
to another ; not suddenly, nor without some prepara-
tion of heightened expectancy, but as in a fantasy,
and with something of the quick alternations of a
dream.

Your garden, gentle reader, is perchance not yet
made. It were indeed happiness if, when good
things betide you, and the time is ripe for your
enterprise, Art

. . . . " Shall say to thee
I find you worthy, do this thing for me."

0)
Q.
Q.

o

.c

i83

CHAPTER VIII.

ON THE OTHER SIDE. A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY.

" I am tired of civilised Europe, and I want to see a wild country
if I can."— W. R. GREG.

" Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall ! " —
TENNYSON.

WE have discussed the theory of a garden ; we
have analysed the motives which prompt its making,
the various treatments of which it is susceptible ; we
have made a kind of inventory of its effects, its en-
chantments, its spendthrift joys. Now we will hear
the other side, and find out why the morbid, tired
man, the modern Hamlet, likes it not, why the son
of culture loathes it as a lack-lustre thing, betokening
to him the sedentary and respectable world in its
most hostile form. Having made our picture now
we will turn it round, and note why it is that the
garden, with its full complement of approved orna-
ment, its selected vegetation, its pretty turns for
Nature, its many-sided beauty —

" Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern was there
Not less than truth designed "

— shall never wholly satisfy.

Your garden will serve you in many ways. It
will give a sense of household warmth to your home.

1 84 GARDEN-CRAFT.

It will smile, or look grave, or be dreamily fanciful
almost at your bidding. If your bent be that way it
will minister to your imaginative reverie, and almost
surfeit' you with its floods of lazy music. If you are
hot, or weary, or dispirited, or touched with ennui,
its calm atmosphere will lay the dust, and lessen the
fret of your life. Yet — let us not blink the fact-
just because all Nature is not represented here ;
because the girdle of the garden walls narrows our
view of the world at large, and excludes more of
Nature's physiognomy than it includes ; because the
garden is, as Sir Walter truly says, entirely " a child
of Art " ; the place, be it never so fair, falls short of
man's imaginative craving, and, when put to the
push, fails to supply the stimulus his varying moods
require. Art's sounding-line will never fathom
human nature's emotional depths.

Nay, one need not be that interesting product
of civilisation, the over-civilised artist who writes
books, and paints pictures, and murmurs rhyme
that —

" Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day."

There is the ennuye of the clubs whom you are
proud to meet in Pall Mall, not a hair of his hat
turned, not a wrinkle marring the sit of his coat ;
meeting him thus and there you would not dream of
supposing that this exquisite trophy of the times is
a prey to reactionary desires ! Yet deep down in
the hidden roots of his being lies a layer of un-

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 185

scotched savagery — an unextinguished, inextinguish-
able strain of the wild man of the woods. Scratch
him, and beneath his skin is Rousseau-Thoreau.
Scratch him again in the. same place, and beneath
his second skin see the brown hide of the aboriginal
Briton, the dweller in wattled abodes, who knew
an earlier England than this, that had swamps and
forests, roadless wastes and unbridled winter floods,
and strange beasts that no man could tame. Even
he (" the sweetest lamb that ever loved a bear ") will
prate to you of the Bohemian delights of an un-
gardened country, where " the white man's poetry "
has not defiled the landscape, and the Britisher shall
be free to take his pleasure sadly.

Let us not be too hard, then, on that dislike of
beauty, that worship of the barbaric which we are
apt to condemn as distempered vagaries, for they
denote maladies incident to the age, which are neither
surprising nor ignoble. This disdain for Art in a
garden, this abhorrence of symmetry, this preference
for the rude and shaggy, what is it but a new turn
given to old instincts, the new Don Quixote sighing
for primaevalism ! This ruthlessness of the followers
of the "immortal Brown" who would navvy away
the residue of the old-fashioned English gardens ;
who live to reverse tradition and to scatter the
lessons of the past to the winds; what is it but a
new quest of the bygone, the knight-errantry of
the civilised man, when turned inside out !

And for yet another reason is the garden unable
to meet the moods of the age. In discussing the

186 GARDEN-CRAFT.

things it may rightly contain, we saw that the laws
of artistic presentment, no less than the avowed
purpose for which a garden is made, require that
only such things shall be admitted, or such aspects
be portrayed there, as conduce to gladness and poetic
charm. And, so far as the garden is concerned, the
restriction is necessary and desirable. As with other
phases of Art, Sculpture, Painting, or Romance, the
things and aspects portrayed must be idealistic, not
realistic ; its effects must be select, not indiscriminate.
The garden is a deliberately contrived thing, a volun-
tary piece of handicraft, purpose-made ; and for this
reason it must not stereotype imperfections ; it may
toy with Nature, but must not wilfully exaggerate
what is ordinary ; only Nature may exaggerate her-
self— not Art. It must not imitate those items in
Nature that are crude, ugly, abnormal, elementary ;
it may not reproduce the absolutely repellent ; or
at most, the artist may only touch them with a light
hand, by way of imaginative hint, but not with
intent to produce a finished picture out of them.

On this point there is a distinct analogy between
the guiding principles of Art and Religion. Art and
Religion both signify effort to comply with an ideal
standard — indeed, the height of the standard is the
test of each — and what makes for innocence or for
faultiness in the one, makes for innocence or faulti-
ness in the other. Innocence is found in each, but
to be without guile in Art or in Religion means
that you must be either flawlessly obedient to a
perfect standard, or be beyond the pale of law

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 187

through pure ignorance of wrong. Where no law
is, there can be no transgression. Between these
two points is no middle-ground, either in the fields
of Art or of Religion.

To apply this to a garden. Untaught, lawless
Nature may present things indiscriminately, as they
are, the casual, the accidental, the savage, in their
native dress, or undress, in all their rugged reality,
and not be ashamed. But the artist-gardener, know-
ing good and evil, exercising free-will in his garden-
craft, must choose only what he may rightly have,
and employ only what his trained judgment or the
unwritten commandments of good taste will allow.

There you have the art of a garden. But be-
cause of its necessary exclusiveness, because all
Nature is not there, the garden, though of the best,
the most far-reaching in its application of art-re-
sources, fails to satisfy all man's imaginative cravings.

Your garden, I said, will serve you many a good
turn. Here one may come to play the truant
from petty worries, to find quiet harbourage in the
chopping sea of life's casual ups and downs ; but
when real trouble comes, on occasions of spiritual
tension, or mental conflict, or heavy depression, then
the perfect beauty of the garden offends ; the garden
has no respect for sadness — then it almost mocks and
flaunts you ; it smiles the same, though your child
die, and then instinct sends you away from the lap
of Art to the bosom of Nature —

" Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her."

1 88 GARDEN-CRAFT.

All of man, then, asks for all of Nature, and is not
content with less. Just as a stringed instrument,
even when lying idle, is awake to sympathetic sound
but refuses to vibrate to notes that are not kindred
to its compass, so the garden, with all its wakeful
magic, will voice only such of your moods as it is in
touch with ; and there are many chords missing in
the cunningly encased music of a garden — many
human notes find no answering pulsation there.

Let us not blink the fact, then ; Art, whether of
this sphere or of that, is not all. If you want beauty
ready-made, obvious gladness of colour, heightened
nobleness of form, suggested romance, Nature idea-
lised— all these things are yours in a garden ; and
yet the very "dressing" of the place which heightens
its appeal to one side of man's being is the bar to its
acceptance on another side. To have been baptised
of Art is to have received gifts rich and strange, that
enable the garden's contents to climb to ideal heights ;
and yet not all men care for perfectness ; the most
part prefer creatures not too bright or good for
human nature's daily food. So, to tell truth, the
wild things of field, forest, and shore have a gamut
of life, a range of appeal wider than the gardens ;
the impunities of lawless Nature reach farther than
man's finished strokes. Nay, when man has done
his best in a garden, some shall even regret, for
sentimental reasons, that he brought Art upon the
scene at all. " Even after the wild landscape,
through which youth had strayed at will, has been
laid out into fields and gardens, and enclosed with

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 189

fences and hedges ; after the footsteps, which had
bounded over the flower-strewn grass have been
circumscribed within firm gravel-walks, the vision
of its former happiness will still at times float before
the mind in its dreams." (" Guesses at Truth.")

Beauty, Romance, and Nature await an audience
with you in the garden ; but it is Beauty after she
has been sent to school to learn the tricks of con-
scious grace ; Beauty that has " the foreign aid of
ornament," that walks with the supple gait of one
who has been well drilled ; but gone are the fine
careless raptures, gone the bounding step, the blithe
impulses of unschooled freedom and gipsy life out of
doors.

Romance awaits you, holding in her hand a
picture of things bright and jocund, full of tender
colour and sweet suggestion ; a picture designed to
prove this world to be unruffled Arcadia, a sunlit
pageant, a dream of delectation, a place for solace, a
Herrick-land

" Of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers ; "

and human life a jewelled tale with all the irony left
out.

Nature awaits you, but only as a fair captive,
ready to respond to your behests, to answer to the
spring of your imaginings. To man's wooing, " I
love you, love me back," she resigned herself, not
perceiving the drift of homage that was paid not so
much to the beauty that she had, but to the beauty
of a heightened sort that should ensue upon his

190 GARDEN-CRAFT.

cultivation, for the sake of which he sought her.
So now her wildness is subdued. The yew and the
holly from the tangled brake shall feel the ignominy
of the shears. The " common " thorn of the hedge
shall be grafted with one of the twenty-seven
rarer sorts ; the oak and maple shall be headed
down and converted into scarlet species ; the single
flowers, obedient to a beautiful disease, shall blow as
doubles, and be propagated by scientific processes
that defy Nature and accomplish centuries of evolu-
tion at a stride. The woodbine from the vernal
wood must be nailed to the carpenter's trellis, the
brook may no more brawl, nor violate its limits, the
leaves of the hollybush and the box shall be varie-
gated, the forest tree and woodland shrub shall have
their frayed hedges shorn, and their wildness pressed
out of them in Art's dissembling embrace.

And as with the green things of the earth, so
with the creatures of the animal world that are
admitted into the sanctuary of a garden. Here is
no place for nonconformity of any kind True, the
spruce little squirrel asks no leave for his dashing
raids upon the beech-mast and the sweet chestnuts that
have escaped the range of the gardener's broom ;
true, the white and golden pheasant and the speckled
goligny may moon about in their distraught fashion
down the green alleys and in and out the shrubberies ;
the foreign duck may frisk in the lake ; the white swan
may hoist her sail, and " float double, swan and
shadow ; " the birds may sing in the trees ; the peacock
may strut on the lawn, or preen his feathers upon

ON THE OTHER SIDE.- A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 191

the terrace walls ; the fallow deer may browse among
the bracken on the other side of the ha-ha — thus
much of the animal creation shall be allowed here,
and not the most fastidious son of Adam will protest
a word. But note the terms of their admission.
They are a select company, gathered with nice judg-
ment from all quarters of the globe, that are bound
over to respectable behaviour, pledged to the beauti-
ful or picturesque ; they are in chains, though the
chains be aerial and not seen.

It is not that the gardener loves pheasants or
peacocks, ducks or swans or guinea-fowls for them-
selves, or for their contribution to the music of the
place. Not this, but because these creatures assist
the garden's magic, they support the illusion upon
which the whole thing is based ; as they flit about,
and cross and recross the scene, and scream, and
quack, and cackle, you get a touch of actuality that
adds finish to the strangeness and piquancy that
prevail around ; they verify your doubting vision,
and make valid the reality of its ideality ; they accord
with the well-swept lawn, the scented air, the flash-
ing radiance of the fountain, the white statuary backed
by dark yews or dim stone alcoves, with the clipt
shrubs, the dreaming trees, the blare of bright
colours, in the shapely beds, the fragrant odours
and select beauties of the place. These living
creatures (for they are alive), prowling about the
grounds,* looking fairly comfortable in artificial

* Lord Beaconsfield adds macaws to the ornament of his ideal
garden. " Sir Ferdinand, when he resided at Armine, was accustomed

192 GARDEN-CRAFT.

surroundings from whence their clipped wings will
not allow them to escape, incline you to believe that
this world is a smooth, genteel, beneficent world after
all, and its pastoral character is here so well sustained
that no one would be a bit surprised if Pan with
his pipe of reeds, or Corydon with his white-fleeced
flock, should turn the corner at any moment.

It is only upon man's terms, however, and to suit
his scheme of scenic effects, that these tame things
are allowed on the premises. They are not here
because man loves them. Woe to the satin-coated
mole that blindly burrowrs on the lawrn ! Woe to
the rabbit that sneaks through the fence, or to the
hare that leaps it ! Woe to the red fox that litters in
the pinetum, or to the birds that make nests in the
shrubberies ! Woe to the otter that takes license to
fish in the ponds at the bottom of the pleasaunce !
Woe to the blackbirds that strip the rowan-tree of
its berries just when autumn visitors are expected !
Woe to the finches that nip the buds off the fruit-
trees in the hard spring frost, presuming upon
David's plea for sacrilege ! Death, instant or pro-
longed, or dear life purchased at the price of a torn
limb, for the silly things that dare to stray where
the woodland liberties are forbidden to either plant
or. animal !

to fill these pleasure grounds with macaws and other birds of gorgeous
plumage." But Lord Beaconsfield is Benjamin Disraeli— a master of
the ornate, a bit of a dandy always. In Italy, too, they throw in
porcupines and ferrets for picturesqueness. In Holland are our old
friends the tin hare and guinea-pigs, and the happy shooting boy, in
holiday attire, painted to the life.

OAT THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 193

So much for the results of man's manipulation
of the universe in the way of making ornamental
grounds ! And the sketch here given applies equally
to the new style or to the old, to the garden after
Loudon or to the garden after Bacon ; the destiny
of things is equally interfered with to meet the
requirements of the one or the other ; the styles
are equally artificial, equally remorseless to primal
Nature.

But one may go farther, and ask : What wonder
at the outcry of the modern Nature-lovers against
a world so altered from its original self as that
Hawthorne should say of England in general that here
"the wildest things are more than half tame? The
trees, for instance, whether in hedgerow, park, or
what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.
They are never ragged ; there is a certain decorous
restraint in the freest outspread of their branches ! "
Nay, so far does this mistaken man carry his diseased
appetite for English soil, marred as it is, that he
shall write : " To us Americans there is a kind of
sanctity even in an English turnip-field, when we
think how long that small square of ground has
been known and recognised as a possession, trans-
mitted from father to son, trodden often by memor-
able feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old
acquaintance with civilised eyes " ("Our Old Home,"

P- 75)-

What wonder, I say, that a land that is so hope-
lessly gardened as this — a land so sentimentalised
and humanised that its very clods, to the American,

o

194 GARDEN-CRAFT.

are " poesy all ramm'd with life " — shall grate the
nerves of the Hamlets of to-day; who live too much
in the sun, whom man delights not, nor woman
neither!

What a land to live in ! when its best landscape
painters — men like Gainsborough or Constable —
are so carried away by the influence of agriculture
upon landscape, so lost to the superiority of wild
solitude, that they will plainly tell you that they like
the fields the farmers work in, and the work they do
in them ; preferring Nature that was modified by
man, painting a well-cultivated country with villages
and mills and church-steeples seen over hedges and
between trees ! *

What a land to live in ! when even Nature's wild

children of field and forest hug their chains — preserve

their old ways and habits up to the very frontier-line

of civilisation. For here is Jefferies (who ought to

know) writing thus : " Modern progress, except where

it has exterminated them, has scarcely touched the

habits of bird or animal ; so almost up to the very

houses of the metropolis the nightingale yearly returns

to her old haunts. If we go a few hours' journey only,

and then step just beyond the highway, where the

steam ploughing-engine has left the mark of its wide

wheels on the dust, and glance into the hedgerow,

the copse, or stream, there are Nature's children as

unrestrained in their wild, free life as they were in

the veritable backwoods of primitive England."

* See P. G. Hamerton's "Sylvan Year," p. 112.

ON THE OTHER SIDE. -A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 195

What wonder that a land where Nature has thus
succumbed wholesale to culture, should exasperate
the man who has earned a right to be morbid, or
that he should cry aloud in his despair, " I am tired
of civilised Europe, and I want to see a wild country
if I can." Too many are our spots renowned for
beauty, our smiling champaigns of flower and fruit.
For " Fair prospects wed happily with fair times ;
but, alas, if times be not fair ! " Hence the comfort
of oppressive surroundings over-sadly tinged, to men
who suffer from the mockery of a place that is too
smiling ! Hence the glory of a waste like Egdon to
Mr. Hardy! ("The Return of the Native," pp. 4, 5).
For Egdon Heath, " Haggard Egdon appealed to a
subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt
emotion than that which responds to the sort of
beauty called charming and fair. Indeed, it is a
question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty
is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale
of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule ; human
souls may find themselves in closer and closer
harmony with external things wearing a sombreness
distasteful to our race when it was young. The time
seems near, if it has not acutally arrived, when the
chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of Nature that is absolutely in keeping
with the moods of the more thinking of mankind.
And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like
Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-
gardens of South Europe are to him now ; and
Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he

o 2

196 GARDEN-CRAFT.

hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheven-
ingen."

I admit that it is strange that time should hold
in reserve such revenges as this ascetic writing
denotes — strange that man should find beauty
irksome, and that he should feel blasted with the
very ecstasy himself has built up in a garden !
strange this sudden recoil of the smooth son of
culture from the extreme of Art, to the extreme of
Nature! Stranger still that the "Yes" and " No "
of the Ideal Hyde and the Real Jekyll should consist
in the same bosom, and that a man shall be, as it
were, a prey to contrary maladies at one and the
same time ! Yet we have found this in Bacon —
prince of fine gardeners, who with all his seeming
content with the heroic pleasaunce that he has made,
shall still betray a sneaking fondness for the maiden
charms of Bohemia outside. Earthly Paradise is fine
and fit, but there must needs be " mounts of some
pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure
breast high to look abroad in the fields " —there must
be " a window open, to fly out at, a secret way to
retire by." Nay, after all, what are to him the
charms that inspire his rhapsody of words — the
things that princes add for state and magnificence !
They are Delilah's charms, and " but nothing to the
true pleasure of a garden ! "

" Our gardens in Paris," says Joubert, "smell
musty ; I do not like these ever-green trees. There
is something of blackness in their greenery, of cold-
ness in their shade. Besides, since they neither lose

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 197

anything, nor have anything to fear, they seem to
me unfeeling, and hence have little interest for
me. . . . Those irregular gardens, which we
call English gardens, require a labyrinth for a
dwelling."

"I hate those trees that never lose their foliage"
(says Landor); "they seem to have no sympathy with
Nature ; winter and summer are alike to them."
Says Thomson,

" For loveliness

Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But it is when unadorned adorn'd the most."
Or Cowley's

" My garden painted o'er

With Nature's hand, not Art's ; and pleasures yield,
Horace might envy in his Sabine field."

Or Addison : " I have often looked upon it as a
piece of happiness that I have never fallen into any
of these fantastical tastes, nor esteemed anything the
more for its being uncommon and hard to be met
with. For this reason I look upon the whole country
in spring-time as a spacious garden, and make as
many visits to a spot of daisies, or a bank of violets,
as a florist does to his borders or parterres. There
is not a bush in blossom within a mile of me which
I am not acquainted with, nor scarce a daffodil or
cowslip that withers away in my neighbourhood
without my missing it." Or Rousseau : " I can
imagine, said I to them, a rich man from Paris or
London, who should be master of this house,
bringing with him an expensive architect to spoil
Nature. With what disdain would he enter this

198 GARDEN-CRAFT.

simple and mean place ! With what contempt
would he have all these tatters uprooted ! What
fine avenues he would open out ! What beau-
tiful alleys he would have pierced ! What fine goose-
feet, what fine trees like parasols and fans ! What
finely fretted trellises ! What beautifully-drawn
yew hedges, finely squared and rounded ! What fine
bowling-greens of fine English turf, rounded, squared,
sloped, ovaled ; what fine yews carved into dragons,
pagodas, marmosets, every kind of monster ! With
what fine bronze vases, what fine stone-founts he
would adorn his garden ! When all that is carried
out, said M. De Wolmar, he will have made a very
fine place, which one will scarcely enter, and will
always be anxious to leave to seek the country."

Or Gautier, upon Nature's wild growths : "You
will find in her domain a thousand exquisitely pretty
little corners into which man seldom or never
penetrates. There, from every constraint, she
gives herself up to that delightful extravagance of
dishevelled plants, of glowing flowers and wild
vegetation — everything that germinates, flowers, and
casts its seeds, instinct with an eager vitality, to the
wind, whose mission it is to disperse them broadcast
with an unsparing hand. . . . And over the rain-
washed gate, bare of paint, and having no trace of
that green colour beloved by Rousseau, we should
have written this inscription in black letters, stone-
like in shape, and threatening in aspect :

' GARDENERS ARE PROHIBITED FROM ENTERING
HERE.'

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 199

"Such a whim — very difficult for one to realise
who is so deeply incrusted with civilisation, where
the least originality is taxed as folly — is continually
indulged in by Nature, who laughs at the judgment
of fools."

Or Thoreau — hero of the Walden shanty, with
his open-air gospel — all Nature for the asking — to
whom a garden is but Nature debauched, and all Art
a sin : " There is in my nature, methinks, a singular
yearning towards wildness. . . . We are apt
enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn's
' Sylva,' 'Acetarium,' and 'Kalendarium Hortense,' but
they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening
is civil and social, but it wants the vigour and freedom
of the forest and the outlaw. . . . It is true there
are the innocent pleasures of country-life, and it is
sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her in-
crease, and gather the fruits in their season, but the
heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retire-
ments and more rugged paths. It will have its gar-
den-plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the
earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its
subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness
as berries. We should not be always soothing and
training Nature. . . . The Indian's intercourse
with Nature is at least such as admits of the great-
est independence of each. If he is somewhat of a
stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much
of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul
in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something
noble and cleanly in the former's distance.

200 ' GARDEN-CRAFT.

There are other savager, and more primeval aspects
of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white
man's poetry."

To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated
hostility of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth
hands and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of civi-
lised life, brings us back to the point from whence we
started at the commencement of this chapter. While
men are what they are, Art is not all. Man has Viking
passions as well as Eden instincts. Man is of mixed
blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as
double. And all of man asks for all of Nature, and
is not content with less. To the over-civilised man
who is under a cloud, the old contentment with ortho-
dox beauty must give place to the subtler, scarcer
instinct, to "the more recently learnt emotion, than
that which responds to the sort of beauty called
charming and fair." Fair effects are only for fair
times. The garden represents to such an one a too
careful abstract of Nature's traits and features that
had better not have been epitomised. The place is
to him a kind of fraud — a forgery, so to speak, of
Nature's autograph. It is only the result of man's
turning spy or detective upon the beauties of the
outer world. Its perfection is too monotonous ; its
grace is too subtle ; its geography too bounded ; its
interest too full of intention — too much sharpened to
a point ; its growth is too uniformly temperate ; its
imagery too exacting of notice. These prim and
trim things remind him of captive princes of the
wood, brightly attired only that they may give

ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 201

romantic interest to the garden — these tame birds
with clipped wings, of distraught aspect and dreamy
tread — these docile animals with their limp legs and
vacant stare, may contribute to the scenic pomp' of
the place, but it is at the expense of their native in-
stincts and the joyous abandon of woodland life.
If this be the outcome of your boasted editing of
Nature, give us dead Nature untranslated. If this be
what comes of your idealisation of the raw materials
of Nature — of the transference of your own emo-
tions to the simple, unsophisticated things of the
common earth, let us rather have Nature's unspoilt
self — " God's Art," as Plato calls Nature — where

" Visions, as prophetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf, and cling to each bough."

" But stay, here come the gardeners ! "
(Enter a gardener and two servants?) — King Richard II.

202

CHAPTER IX.

IN PRAISE OF BOTH.

" In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be." — BEN JONSON.

"The Common all men have." — GEORGE HERBERT.

WHAT shall we say, then, to the two conflicting
views of garden-craft referred to in my last chapter,
wherein I take the modern position, namely, that the
love of Art in a garden, and the love of wild things
in Nature's large estate, cannot co-exist in the same
breast ? Is the position true or false ?

To see the matter in its full bearings I must
fetch back a little, and recall what was said in a
former chapter (p. 85) upon the differing attitudes
towards Nature taken by the earlier and later schools
of gardening. There is, I said, no trace in the
writings, or in the gardening, of the earlier traditional
school, of that mawkish sentiment about Nature, that
condescending tenderness for her primal shapes,
that has nursed the scruples, and embarrassed the
efforts of the " landscape-gardener " from Kent's and
Brown's days to now.

The older gardener had no half-and-half methods ;
he made no pretence of Nature-worship, nursed no

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 203

scruples that could hinder the expression of his own
mind about Nature, or check him from fathoming
all her possibilities. Yet with all his seeming
unscrupulousness the old gardener does not close
his eyes or his heart to Nature at large, but whether
in the garden sanctuary or out of it, he maintains
equally tender relations towards her.

But the scruples of the earlier phase of the land-
scape school, about tampering with Nature by way
of attaining Art effects, are as water unto wine com-
pared with what is taught by men of the same school
now-a-days. We have now to reckon with an alto-
gether deeper stratum of antipathy to garden-craft
than was reached by the followers of Brown. We
have not now to haggle with the quidnuncs over the
less or more of Art permissible in a garden, but to
fight out the question whether civilisation shall have
any garden at all. Away with this " white man's
poetry ! " The wild Indian's " intercourse with
Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest
independence of each. If he is somewhat of a
stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a
familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the
latter's closeness to his .mistress, something noble
and cleanly in the former's distance." " Alas ! " says
Newman, " what are we doing all through life, both
as a necessity and a duty, but unlearning the world's
poetry, and attaining to its prose ? "

One does not fear, however, that the English
people will part lightly with their land's old poetry,
however seductive the emotion which we are told " pre-

204 GARDEN-CRAFT.

fers the oppression of surroundings over-sadry tinged,
and solitudes that have a lonely face, suggesting
tragical possibilities to the old-fashioned sort of
beauty called charming and fair."

The lesson we have to learn is the falsehood of
extremes. The point we have to master is, that in
the prodigality of " God's Plenty " many sorts of
beauty are ours, and nothing shall be scorned.
God's creation has a broad gamut, a vast range, to
meet our many moods. " There are, it may be, so
many kinds of music in the world, and none of them
is without signification."

" O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty."

There is nothing contradictory in the variety and
multiformity of Nature, whether loose and at large
in Nature's unmapped geography, or garnered and
assorted and heightened by man's artistry in the
small proportions of a perfect garden. Man, we
said, is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so
much divided as double, and each sympathy shall
have free play. My inborn Eden instincts draw me
to the bloom and wonder of the world ; my Viking
blood drives me to the snap and enthusiasm of
anarchic forms, the colossal images, the swarthy
monotony, the sombre aspects of Nature in the wild.
Yet " all is beauty."

Thus much by way of preamble. And now, after
repeating that the gardener of the old formality,
however sternly he discipline wild Nature for the
purposes of beauty, is none the less capable of loving

IN PRAISE OF BOTH, 205

and of holding friendly commerce with the things
that grew outside his garden hedge, let me bring
upon my page a modern of moderns, who, by the
wide range of his sympathies, recalls the giants of a
healthier day, and redeems a generation of lop-sided
folk abnormally developed in one direction.

And the poet Wordsworth, self-drawn in his own
works, or depicted by his friends, is one of the old
stock of sane, sound-hearted Englishmen, who can
be equally susceptible to the inward beauties of man's
created brain-world, and the outward beauties of
unkempt Nature. So the combination we plead for
is not impossible ! The two tastes are not irrecon-
cilable ! Blessed be both !

We may trust Wordsworth implicitly as an
authority upon Nature. No one questions his know-
ledge of wild woodland lore. There is no one of
ancient or of modern times who in his outward mien,
his words, his habits, carries more indisputable proof
of the prophet's ordination than the man who spent
a long noviciate in his native mountain solitudes.
There is no one so fully entitled, or so well able to
speak of and for her, as he who knows her language to
the faintest whisper, who spent his days at her feet,
who pored over her lineaments under every change of
expression, who in his writings drew upon the secret
honey of the beauty and harmony of the world,
telling, to use his own swinging phrases, of " the
joy and happiness of loving creatures, of men and
children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams,
and trees and flowers ; with the changes of night and

2o6 GARDEN-CRAFT.

day, evening and morning, summer and winter ; and
all their unwearied actions and energies."

Of all Nature's consecrated children, he is the
prince of the apostolate ; he is, so to speak, the
beloved disciple of them all, whose exalted personal
love admits him to the right to lean upon her breast,
to hear her heart-beats, to catch knowledge there
that had been kept secret since the world began.
None so familiar with pastoral life in its varied time-
fulness, sweet or stern, glad or grim, pathetic or
sublime, as he who carries in his mind the echoes of
the passion of the storm, the moan of the passing
wind with its beat upon the bald mountain-crag, the
sighing of the dry sedge, the lunge of mighty waters,
the tones of water-falls, the inland sounds of caves
and trees, the plaintive spirit of the solitude. There
are none who have pondered so deeply over " the
blended holiness of earth and sky," the gesture of the
wind and cloud, the silence of the hills ; none so free
to fraternise with things bold or obscure, great or
small, as he who told alike of the love and infinite
longings of Margaret, of the fresh joy of

" The blooming girl whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew,"

of the lonely star, the solitary raven, the pliant
hare-bell, swinging in the breeze, the meadows and
the lower ground, and all the sweetness of a common
dawn.

Thus did Wordsworth enter into the soul of
things and sing of them

" In a music sweeter than their own."

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 207

Nay, says Arnold, " It might seem that Nature not
only gave him the matter of his poem, but wrote his
poem for him" (" Essays in Criticism," p. 155).

So much for Wordsworth upon Nature out of
doors ; now let us hear him upon Art in a garden, of
which he was fully entitled to speak, and we shall
see that the man is no less the poet of idealism upon
his own ground, than the poet of actuality in the
woodland world.

Writing to his friend Sir Geo. Beaumont,* with
all the outspokenness of friendship and the simplicity
of a candid mind, he thus delivers himself upon the
Art of Gardening : " Laying out grounds, as it is
called, may be considered as a liberal Art, in some
sort like poetry and painting, and its object is, or
ought to be, to move the affections under the control
of good sense ; that is, those of the best and wisest ;
but, speaking with more precision, it is to assist Nature
in moving the affections of those who have the deepest
perception of the beauties of Nature, who have the most
valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, the most
independent, the most ennobling with Nature and human
life."

Hearken to Nature's own high priest, turned
laureate of the garden ! How can this thing be ?
Here is the man whose days had been spent at
Nature's feet, whose life's business seemed to be this
only, that he should extol her, interpret her, sing of
her, lift her as high in man's esteem as fine utter-
ance can affect the human soul. Yet when he has

* See Myers' " Wordsworth," English Men of Letters Series, p. 67.

2o8 GARDEN-CRAFT.

done all, said all that inspired imagination can say in
her praise, in what seems an outburst of disloyalty
to his old mistress, he deliberately takes the crown
himself had woven from off the head of Nature and
places it on the brows of Art in a garden !

Not Bacon himself could write with more dis-
cernment or with more fervour of garden-craft than
this, and the pronouncement gains further signifi-
cance as being the deliberately expressed opinion of
a great poet, and him the leader of the modern School
of Naturalists. And that these two men, separated
not merely by two centuries of time, but by the
revolutionary influences which coloured them, should
find common ground and shake hands in a garden, is
strange indeed ! Both men loved Nature. Bacon, as
Dean Church remarks,* had a "keen delight in
Nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the
charm of open-air life ; " but his regard for Nature's
beauties was not so ardent, his knowledge of her
works and ways not so intimate or so scientifically
verified, his senses not so sympathetically allured as
Wordsworth's ; he had not the same prophet's vision
that could see into the life of things, and find
thoughts there " that do often lie too deep for tears."
That special sense Wordsworth himself fathered.

Points like these add weight to Wordsworth's
testimony of the high rank of gardening, and we do
well to note that the wreath that the modern man
brings for Art in a garden is not only greener and

* " Bacon," English Men of Letters Series, R. W. Church.

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 209

fresher than the garland of the other, but it was
gathered on loftier heights; it means more, it implies
a more emphatic homage.

And Wordsworth had not that superficial know-
ledge of gardening which no gentleman's head
should be without. He knew it as a craftsman knows
the niceties of his craft. " More than one seat in the
lake-country," says Mr. Myers (" Wordsworth/' p.
68), " among them one home of pre-eminent beauty,
have owed to Wordsworth no small part of their
ordered charm."

Of Wordsworth's own garden, one writes : " I
know that thirty years ago that which struck me
most at Rydal Mount, and which appeared to me its
greatest charm, was the union of the garden and the
wilderness. You passed almost imperceptibly from
the trim parterre to the noble wood, and from the
narrow, green vista to that wide sweep of lake and
mountain which made up one of the finest landscapes
in England. Nor could you doubt that this unusual
combination was largely the result of the poet's own
care and arrangement. He had the faculty for such
work."

Here one may well leave the matter without
further labouring, content to have proved by the
example of a four-square, sane genius, that those
instincts of ours which seem to pull contrary ways —
Art-wards or Nature-wards — and to drive our lop-
sided selves to the falsehood of extremes, are, after
all, not incompatible. The field, the waste, the moor,
the mountain, the trim garden with its parterres and

210 GARDEN-CRAFT.

terraces, are one Nature. These things breathe one
breath, they sing one music, they share one heart
between them ; the difference between the dressed and
the undressed is only superficial. The art of garden-
ing is not intended to supersede Nature, but only " to
assist Nature in moving the affections of those who
have the deepest perceptions of the beauties of
Nature, who have the most valuable feelings, . . .
the most ennobling with Nature and human life."

One need not, if Wordsworth's example prove
anything, be less the child of the present (but
rather the more) because one can both appreciate
the realities of rude Nature, and that deliberately-
contrived, purpose-made, piece of human handicraft,
a well-equipped garden. One need not be less sus-
ceptible to the black forebodings of this contention-
tost, modern world, nor need one's ear be less alert
to Nature's correspondence to

" The still, sad music of humanity,''

because one experiences with old Mountaine, " a
jucunditie of minde " in a fair garden. There is an
unerring rightness both in rude Nature and in
garden grace, in the chartered liberty of the one, and
the unchartered freedom of unadjusted things in the
other. Blessed be both !

It is worth something to have mastered truth,
which, however simple and elementary it seem, is
really vital to the proper understanding of the rela-
tion of Art to Nature. It helps one to appraise at
their proper value the denunciations of the disciples of

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 211

Kent and Brown against Art in a garden, and to see,
on the other hand, why Bacon and the Early School
of gardeners loved Nature in the wild state no less
than in a garden. It dispels any lingering hesitation
we may have as to the amount of Art a garden may
receive in defiance of Dryasdust " codes of taste."
It explains what your artist-gardener friend meant
when he said that he had as much sympathy with,
and felt as much interest in, the moving drama of
Nature going on on this as on that side of his garden-
hedge, and how he could pass from the rough theme
outside to the ordered music inside, from the uncer-
tain windings in the coppice-glade to the pleached
alley of the garden, without sense of disparagement
to the one or the other. It explains why it is that
nothing in Nature goes unobserved of him ; how
you shall call to see him and hunt the garden over,
and at last find him idling along the bridle-path in
the plantation, his fist full of flowers, his mind set
on Nature's affairs, his ear in such unison with local
sounds that he shall tell you the dominant tone of
the wind in the tree-tops. Or he is in the covert's
tangle enjoying

" Simple Nature's breathing life,"

surprising the thorn veiled in blossom, revelling in
the wealth of boundless life there, in the variety of
plant-form, the palpitating lights, the melody of
nesting birds, the common joy and sweet assurance
of things.

" Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude."

212 GARDEN-CRAFT.

Or it may be he is on the breezy waste, lying full
length among the heather, watching the rabbits'
gambols, or the floating thistle-down with its hint of
unseen life in the air, or sauntering by the stream in
the lower meadows, learning afresh the glory of weed
life in the lush magnificence of the great docks,
the red sorrel, the willow-herb, the purple thistles,
and the gay battalions of fox-gloves thrown out in
skirmishing order, that swarm on each eminence and
hedgerow. Or you may meet him hastening home
for the evening view from the orchard-terrace, to see
the solemn close of day, and the last gleam of sun-
shine fading over the hill.

It is worth something, I say, to win clear hold of
the fact that Nature in a garden and Nature in the
wild are at unity ; that they have each their place in
the economy of human life, and that each should have
its share in man's affections. The true gardener is in
touch with both. He knows where this excels or
falls behind the other, and because he knows the
range of each, he fears no comparison between them.
He can be eloquent upon the charms of a garden, its
stimulus for the tired eye and mind, the harmony
that resides in the proportions of its lines and masses,
the gladness of its colour, the delight of its frankly
decorative arrangement, the sense of rest that comes
of its symmetry and repeated patterns. He will tell
you that for halcyon days, when life's wheels run
smooth, and the sun shines, even for life's average
days, there is nothing so cheery, nothing so blithely
companionable, nothing that can give such a sense of

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 213

household warmth to your home as a pleasant
garden. And yet none will be more ready to warn
you of the limits of a garden's charms, of its sheer
impotence to yield satisfaction at either end of the
scale of human joy or sorrow.

And so it is. Let but the mist of melancholy
descend upon you, let but the pessimistic distress to
which we moderns are all prone penetrate your
mind, let you be the prey of undermining sorrow, or
lie under the shadow of bereavement, and it is not to
the garden that you will go for Nature's comfort.
The chalices of its flowers store not the dew that
shall cool your brow. Nay, at times like these the
garden poses as a kind of lovely foe, to mock you
with its polite reticence, its look of unwavering com-
placency, its gentle ecstasy. Then the ear refuses
the soft and intimate garden-melodies, and asks
instead for the rough unrehearsed music of Nature in
the wild, the jar and jangle of winds and tides, the
challenge of discords,

" The conflict and the sounds that live in darkness,"

the wild rhetoric of the night upon some " haggard
Egdon," or along the steep wild cliffs when the storm
is up, and the deeps are troubled, and the earth
throbs and throbs again with the violence of the
waves that break and bellow in the caves beneath
your feet ; and then it perhaps shall cross your mind
to set this brief moment of your despair against the
unavailing passion of tides that for ten thousand
years and more have hurled themselves against this

214 GARDEN-CRAFT.

heedless shore. Or you shall find some sequestered
corner of the land that keeps its scars of old-world
turmoil, the symptoms of the hustle of primeval
days, the shock of grim shapes, long ago put to sleep
beneath a coverlet of sweet-scented turf; and the
unspoiled grandeur of the scene will prick and arouse
your dulled senses, while its peaceful face will
assure you that, as it was with the troubled masonry
of the hills in the morning of the world, even so
shall it be with you — time shall tranquillise and at
length cancel all your woes. Or again,

" Should life be dull, and spirits low

'Twill soothe us in our sorrow
That earth has something yet to show,

The bonny holms of Yarrow."

Better tonic, one thinks, for the over-wrought
brain than the soft glamour of the well-swept lawn,
the dipt shrubs, the focussed beauty of dotted speci-
mens, the ordered disorder of wriggling paths and
sprawling flower-beds of strange device, the ran-
sacked wardrobe of the gardener's stock of gay
bedding-plants, or other of the permitted charms of a
modern garden ; better than these is the stir and
enthusiasm of Nature's broad estate, the boulder-
tossed moor, where the hare runs races in her mirth,
and the lark has a special song for your ear ; or the
high transport of hours of indolence spent basking in
the bed of purple heather, your nostrils filled with
gladsome air and the scent of thyme, your eyes
following the course of the milk-white clouds that
ride with folded sails in the blue heavens overhead

IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 215

and cast flying shadows on the uplands, where
nothing breaks the silence of the hills but the song
in the air, the tinkle of the sheep-bells, and the
murmur of the moorland bee.

And the upshot of the matter is this. The
master-things for the enjoyment of life are : health,
a balanced mind that will not churlishly refuse
" God's plenty," an eye quick to discern the marvel of
beautiful things, a heart in sympathy with man and
beast. Possessing these we may defy Fortune —

" I care not, Fortune, what you me deny :
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face ;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and. lawns, by living stream, at eve :
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave ;
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."

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