Garden-Craft Old and New Part 8

[Footnote 26: 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' Park.]

With the pictures of the gardens at Levens before us, with memories of Arley, of Brympton, of Wilton,[27] of Montacute, Rockingham, Penshurst, Severn End, Berkeley,[28] and Haddon, we may here pause a moment to count up and bewail our 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 adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the late war."

[Footnote 27: The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and contain n.o.ble 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.]

[Footnote 28: Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the forecourt is n.o.ble, 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."]

Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, had a n.o.ble 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 _Fauconbergh's_ garden at _Sutton 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 gra.s.s on either side, with a hedge of rue on one side next a low wall, and a row of 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 Fox's_ 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 1; and "one very faire tree called the Irish arbutis, very lovely to look upon and worth 1, 10s." (Lysons, I., 397.)

The gardens at Sherborne Castle were laid out by Sir Walter Raleigh.

c.o.ker, 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 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. 124). 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 horticultural 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 gus...o...b.. 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, avenues, 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 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 c.o.c.kney 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 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 rhapsody--"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 att.i.tude 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 masterpieces. 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 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sing 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 outlet for their love of, their elation at, the sight of beautiful 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 a.n.a.lysis. "Very great laws," he says, "may be ill.u.s.trated in a very small compa.s.s." 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 architecture 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 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 loveable 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 pa.s.sion of men of Utopian dreams, the ideal (in one kind) of the spoiled children of culture, the knight-errantry of the Renascence--whose imagination 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 unknown 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 gra.s.s--not 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 ent.i.tled 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 vulgarised and beggared by the banishment of the old pleasaunces of the days of Elizabeth, or of the Jameses and Charleses, and their wholesale demolition 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 t.i.t 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."

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 decoration 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 specimen plants, Loudon remarks that in the earlier century the taste for foreign plants was confined to a few, and they not wealthy persons; but in the eighteenth century the taste for planting foreign trees extended itself among rich landed proprietors. 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 1400, but the numbers taken by centuries are: in the sixteenth century, 89; in the seventeenth century, 131; in the eighteenth 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 elaborate essay-writing, and nothing was considered satisfactory. 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 cla.s.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 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-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, 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 gardening 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 n.o.bility 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 gra.s.s plats or borders of flowers. "Each rises above the other by two or three steps, and as many walks and terra.s.ses; 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 suppose, not a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you pa.s.sed a narrow gut between two terra.s.ses 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 Walpole's narrative, and to so absurd an extent has formality 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 compa.s.s 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 recommend the regular form of garden. "I should hardly advise any of these attempts"

cited by Walpole, "in the form of gardens among us; _they are adventures of too hard achievement for any common hands_." The truth will out! The "dainter 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 respects 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 ornamental 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 Walpole'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 gardener 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, 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, j.a.pan 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 perpetrated about his time under Dutch influences. Close alliance with Holland through the House of Orange had affected every department of horticulture. 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 Lambert, writing to the Linnaean Transactions in 1712, "were remarkable for fine cut greens, and clipt yews in the shapes of birds, dogs, men, ships, &c. Mr. Parkinson in Lambeth was much noticed for these 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 n.o.ble 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 conventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of shreds and patches!

Having arrived at such a pa.s.s, 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 revolution 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 boundaries, and the subst.i.tution 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 of garden-ornament was clean put out of mind, and the gra.s.s 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!