Garden-Craft Old and New Part 7

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

The English people had not to wait till the eighteenth century to know to what they were inclined, 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 gra.s.s. 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 courtier-gardener may be, however learned in the circ.u.mspect 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 forwarde in the name of G.o.d, graffe, set, plant, and nourishe up trees in every corner of your grounde." A seventeenth-century gardener (Evelyn) had ornamental 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 contribute to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf; 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 greenness in France during most of the summer." And following upon this is a long essay upon the ornamental 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,[23] but the success is wholly in the gardener."

[Footnote 23: 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, ma.s.sive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence the monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-disposed 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 effeminate 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!]

And Bacon is not so wholly enamoured of Arcadia and with the embodiment of far-brought fancies in his "prince-like" garden as to be callous of 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 a.s.signed 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 gra.s.s 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.[24]

[Footnote 24: Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.]

Whether the garden of Bacon's essay is the portrait 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 masterpiece, Bacon had no more notion of posing as the 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 gla.s.s, and such things of l.u.s.tre; encompa.s.sed also with fine rails of low statues."[25]

[Footnote 25: _Nineteenth Century Magazine_, July, 1890.]

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 reasonableness of suggestions for design that have as much regard for the veracities of Nature, and the dictates of common-sense, as for the nice elegancies 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 gardeners!

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 "landscape gardener,"--who dotes on meagre country-gra.s.s and gipsy scenery--pause in his denunciation of Art in a garden. "G.o.d 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 Perfection."

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 subject. I think of Ben Jonson's simile, "They jump farthest who fetch their race largest." For Bacon "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 declare 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 gardening 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-aspirations unawares.

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

"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 Pyramids, I like well; and in some places Fair Columns upon Frames of Carpenters' work. I would also have the Alleys s.p.a.cious 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 Garden 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 spilling, and making it rise in several forms (of Feathers, Drinking Gla.s.ses, 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, Judgment is in the ascendant, and before the sentence is done the balance rides easy. And this scrupulousness 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 running upon "trifles and jingles." The master-text of the whole Essay seems to be the writer's own apothegm: "Nature is commanded by obeying her."

That a true gardener should love Nature goes without saying. And Bacon loved Nature pa.s.sionately, and gardens only too well. He tells us these were his favourite sins in the strange doc.u.ment--half prayer, half Apologia--written after he had made his will, at the time of his fall, when he presumably concluded that _anything_ might happen. "Thy creatures have been my books, but Thy Scriptures 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 gardening 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 pa.s.s 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 att.i.tude of Bacon and his school towards external Nature. In them is no trace of the mawkish sentimentality of the modern "landscape-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 a.s.signation 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, compared 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 cla.s.sic book "Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest-trees," how they 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 themselves.

On one point the modern garden has the advantage 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 taken the trouble to reckon up the number of specimens 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) it 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 Cra.s.sa (a green) had a flower on it of the 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 contrariness; it is the cultured man's hankering after a many-faced Nature readily accessible 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 secret way to retire by"? In a sense, the garden's technique ill.u.s.trates 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 16th 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 encompa.s.sed 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 G.o.ddess 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 summerhouse, 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 dispense 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 Parterre 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 Terra.s.ses covered with Lead and fenced with Bal.u.s.ters; and the Pa.s.sage 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.

"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 Sh.e.l.l-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 cla.s.s 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 Pa.s.se's "Book of Beasts, Birds, Flowers, Fruits, &c.,"

published in London (1630), heralds the changes which set in with the introduction 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 English, but English with a difference--with a declared tendency this way or that, which justifies cla.s.sification, and ill.u.s.trates 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 ca.n.a.ls, the winding gravel-walks, the formal geometrical figures; the quincunx and _etoile_ 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 ill.u.s.trations, 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 staircase 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 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 peac.o.c.ks 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,[26] 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."