CHAPTER III.

"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,And leves be large and longe,Hit is full mery in feyre foresteTo 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";

"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,And leves be large and longe,Hit is full mery in feyre foresteTo 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."

or shall we hear tell from Chaucer how

"When that Aprille, with his showrës swootThe drought of March hath pierced to the root,Then longen folk to gone on pilgrimages."

"When that Aprille, with his showrës swootThe 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 incidental 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[14]pictures walking about our English lanes in old days? "What wonderful 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 studying English orchids!"

Or shall we take down the classic volumes of Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Cowley, Isaak Walton,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 tendency 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 signifies that Nature is held in duress here. Nature of herself cannot rise above Nature, and man, seeing perfections through her imperfections, capacitiesthrough 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 conditions 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 wasArt, in that phase it wasNature, 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 discrimination as to their fitness for imitation, or their suitableness to the position assigned to them. To what extent, we ask, may the forms of Nature be copied or recast? 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 problems of man's standing to the world of Nature, the laws of idealism and realism, the nice distinctions of "more and less."

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 Gaspar 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 rightness of the art of the thing is questionable. "Canst thou catch Leviathan with a hook?" The primæval 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 ofa 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 gardener; 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's 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-flatswhere 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 infinitieMake a terrestrial gallaxieAs 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 blackness 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 ofher 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 giveéclatto 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!

"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 mediæval garden is only to be acquired piecemeal, out of casual references in old chronicles, and stray pictures in illuminatedmanuscripts, 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 horticultural 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 elaborate 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 Nôtre: 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.

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 enthusiastic 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 gardens 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."[15]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 thateven the thirteenth-century Englishman had a standard 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 Garlandia, 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"[16]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 sortsmentioned in old books, which include the red, the sweet-musk, double and single, the damask, the velvet, 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 seasonAre our carnations and streak'd gilly flower."Winter's Tale.

"The fairest flowers o' the seasonAre our carnations and streak'd gilly flower."

Winter's Tale.

"Their use," says a quaint writer, "is much in ornament, 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 mediæval 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 valuableDictionary of Principal Subjects in the British Museum[17]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 separated 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 wall; the front of the bank is then faced with a lowpartition 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 connection 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 Banqueting 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 unscrupulous 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 utilized for the culture of fruit trees. Lawson, anold 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 Ingenuities 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-scented 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 gardens with the mote, and the orchards as exceedingfair; "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 clipt 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 tothe same pitch of extravagant fancy in England as in France, Holland, or Italy.

Upon a general review of the subject of ornamental 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 theGiardino Jiustiis 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: "Whowill 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."[18]

In France, where estates are larger, and the surface of the country more even and regular, the ornamental grounds, while following the Italian in certain 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 Sévigné, 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 Heutzner, 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 Nôtre, 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 Nôtre is, in fact, based upon thetheory that Nature shall contribute a bare space upon which man shall lay out a garden of symmetrical character, and trees, shrubs, and flowers are regarded 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, regularly planted walks, bounded by chestnuts or limes; while the gardens are equally cut up into lines of trellises 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 Durfé!" 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 nextto 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 indigenous 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 unfavourable 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,thereforethese niggardly strips, snatched from "an amphibious world" (as Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty. The landscape outside gapes with uniform dulness,thereforethe garden within shall be spick and span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers no objects for measuring distance,thereforethe perspective of the garden shall be a marvel of adroit planningand conjured proportions. The room is small,thereforeits every inch shall seem an ell. The garden is a mere patch,thereforethe patch shall be elaborately darned and pattern-stitched all over. The eye may not travel far, or can get no joy in a distant view,thereforeit shall rest in pure content, focussed upon a scene where rich and orderly garniture can no farther go.

Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved blessings in disguise. Necessity, the mother of invention, has produced the Dutch garden out of the most untoward geography, and if we find in its qualities and features traces of the conditions which surrounded 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 of 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 foreground 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 asrust 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 fairyland 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 decoration—this child's puzzle of coloured earth, substituted 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-fancifulnessin George Meredith's remark that "dulness 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 suggestive of very charming effects. The transcendentcharacteristic 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 theconsciousrelish 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 theconsciousdelight in landscape must have been preceded by anunconscioussympathy 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 traditional 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 reinauguration of the elemental. Let it not be said,then, that Brown discovered the model, for her fairness 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 woodland 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 determine. 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.[19]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 thirteenth 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 greensward,

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

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 shrubbery, 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 landscape 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 boonPoured 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 meaning. 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 mappedout 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 nestling 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 greyWhere the nibbling flocks do stray,Mountains on whose barren breastThe labouring clouds do often rest,Meadows prim with daisies pied,Shallow brooks and rivers wide"—

the land that Richard Jefferies says "wants no gardening, itcannotbe gardened; the least interference 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 Englishlandscape 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 atmospheric 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 picturesqueness of the smallest object that lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it anywhere." ("Our Old Home," p. 78.)

Therealworld of England, then, is, in the Englishman's opinion, itself so fair "it wants no gardening." Our school of gardeners seem to havefound 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 Paradise;" 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, moonlight bowers, have been always with us.

It might seem ungenerous to institute a comparison 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 outspoken manner. Speaking of the French gardens, Diderot, in his Encyclopædia (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 parterres, 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 offlowers 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 thePetit Trianonwas in itself an improvement upon, or rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of theOrangerie, the basins of Latona and of Neptune, and the superbtapis vert, with its bordering groves of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur Young's unflattering description of the Queen'sJardin Angloisat 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,[20]more effort than Nature, and more expense 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,walks, temples, and even villages." Truly aJardin Anglois!

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 miscellaneous elements that took its name in vain in thePetit 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 conscious and deliberate. But the convention is broad, dignified, quiet, homogeneous, suiting alike the characteristics 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, andtranscribe 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 unexhausted 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 descent, 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—

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