Part 14

We went on with our consideration of our Treillage--after a considerable silence. But when a silence comes between Dorothy and me it does not take the form of an impenetrable wall, nor yet that of a yew hedge with gaps in it; but rather that of a grateful screen of sweet-scented honeysuckle. It is the silence within a bower of white clematis--the silence of “heaven's ebon vault studded with stars unutterably bright”--the silence of the stars which is an unheard melody to such as have ears to hear.

“Yes,” said I at last, “I am sure that you are right: an oval centre from which the laths radiate--that shall be our new trellis.”

And so it was.

Our life in the Garden of Peace is, you will perceive, something of what the catalogues term “of rampant growth.” It is as digressive as a wild convolvulus. I perceive this now that I have taken to writing about it. It is not literary, but discursive. It throws out, it may he, the slenderest of tendrils in one direction; but this “between the bud and blossom,” sometimes Hies off in another, and the effect of the whole is pleasantly unforeseen.

It is about time that we had a firm trellis for the truant tendrils.

And so I will discourse upon Treillage as a feature of the garden.

Its effect seems to have been lost sight of for a long time, but happily within recent years its value as an auxiliary to decoration is being recognised. I have seen lovely hits in France as well as in Italy. It is one of the oldest imitations of Nature to be found in connection with garden-making, and to me it represents exactly what place art should take in that modification of Nature which we call a garden. We want everything that grows to be seen to the greatest advantage. Nature grows rampant climbers, and if we allowed them to continue rampageous, we should have a jungle instead of a garden; so we agree to give her a helping band by offering her aspiring children something pleasant to cling to from the first hour of their sending forth grasping fingers in search of the right ladder for their ascent. A trellis is like a family living: it provides a decorative career for at least one member of the family.

The usual trellis-work, as it is familiarly called: has the merit of being cheap--just now it is more than twice the price that it was five years ago; but still it does not run into a great deal of money unless it is used riotously, and this, let me say, is the very worst way in which it could be adapted to its purpose. To fix it all along the face of a wall of perhaps forty feet in length is to force it to do more than it should be asked to do. The wall is capable of supporting a climbing plant without artificial aid. But if the wall is unsightly, it were best hidden, and the eye can bear a considerable length of simple trellis without becoming weary. In this connection, however, my experience forces me to believe that one should shun the “extending” form of lattice-shaped work, but choose the square-mesh pattern.

This, however, is only Treillage in its elementary form. If one wishes to have a truly effective screen offering a number of exquisite outlines for the entwining of some of the loveliest things that grow, one must go further in one's choice than the simple diagonals and rectagonals--the simple verticals and horizontals. The moment that curves are introduced one gets into a new field of charm, and I know of no means of gaining better effects than by elaborating this form of joinery as the French did two centuries ago, before the discovery was made that every form of art in a garden is inartistic. But possibly if the French _treillageurs_--for the art had many professors--had been a little more modest in their claims the landscapests would not have succeeded in their rebellion. But the _treillageurs_ protested against such beautiful designs as they turned out being obscured by plants clambering over them, and they offered in exchange repoussé metal foliage, affirming that this was incomparably superior to a natural growth. Ordinary people refused to admit so ridiculous a claim, and a cloud came over the prospects of these artists. Recently, however, with a truer rapprochement between the “schools” of garden design, I find several catalogues of eminent firms illustrating their reproductions of some beautiful French and Dutch work.

Personally, I have a furtive sympathy with the conceited Frenchmen. It seems to me that it would be a great shame to allow the growths upon a fine piece of Treillage to become so gross as to conceal all the design of the joinery. Therefore I hold that such ambitious climbers as Dorothy Perkins or Crimson Rambler should be provided with an unsightly wall and bade to make it sightly, and that to the more graceful and less distracting clematis should any first-class woodwork be assigned. This scheme will give both sides a chance in the summer, and in the winter there will be before our eyes a beautiful thing to look upon, even though it is no longer supporting a plant, and so fulfilling the ostensible object of its existence.

There should be no limit to the decorative possibilities of the Treillage lath. A whole building can be constructed on this basis. I have seen two or three very successful attempts in such a direction in Holland; and quite enchanting did they seem, overclambered by Dutch honeysuckle. I learned that all were copied from eighteenth century designs. I saw another Dutch design in an English garden in the North.

It took the form of a sheltered and canopied seat. It had a round tower at each side and a gracefully curved back. The “mesh” used in this little masterpiece was one of four inches. It was painted in a tint that looks best of all in garden word--the gray of the _echeveria glauca_, and the blooms of a beautiful Aglaia rose were playing hide-and-seek among the laths of the roof. I see no reason why hollow pillars for roses should not be made on the Treillage principle. I have seen such pillars supporting the canopied roof of more than one balcony in front of houses in Brighton and Hove. I fancy that at one time these were fashionable in such places. In his fine work entitled _The English Home from Charles I. to George IV._, Mr. J. Alfred Gotch gives two illustrations of Treillage adapted to balconies.

But to my mind, its most effective adaptation is in association with a pergola, especially if near the house. To be sure, if the space to be filled is considerable, the work for both sides would be somewhat expensive; but then the cost of such things is very elastic; it is wholly dependent upon the degrees of elaboration in the design. But in certain situations a pergola built up in this way may be made to do duty as an anteroom or a loggia, and as such it gives a good return for an expenditure of money; and if constructed with substantial uprights--I should recommend the employment of an iron core an inch in diameter for these, covered, I need hardly say, with the laths--and painted every second year, the structure should last for half a century. Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema carried out a marvellous scheme of this type at his house in St. John's Wood. It was on a Dutch plan, but was not a copy of any existing arrangement of gardens. I happen to know that the design was elaborated by himself and his wife on their leaving his first St. John's Wood home: it was a model of what may be called “_l'haut Treillage_.”

Once again I would venture to point out the advantage of having a. handsome thing to look at during the winter months when an ordinary pergola looks its worst.

Regarding pergolas in general a good deal might be written. Their popularity in England just now is well deserved. There is scarcely a garden of any dimensions that is reckoned complete unless it encloses one within its walls. A more admirable means of dividing a ground space so as to make two gardens of different types, could scarcely be devised, in the absence of a yew or box growth of hedge; nor could one imagine a more interesting way of passing from the house to the garden than beneath such a roof of roses. In this case it should play the part of one of those “vistas” which were regarded as indispensable in the eighteenth century. It should have a legitimate entrance and it should not stop abruptly. If the exigencies of space make for such abruptness, not a moment's delay there should be in the planting of a large climbing shrub on each side of the exit so as to embower it, so to speak. A vase or a short pillar should compel the dividing of the path a little further on, and the grass verge--I am assuming the most awkward of exits--should he rounded off in every direction, so as to cause the ornament to become the feature up to which the pergola path is leading. I may mention incidentally at this moment that such an isolated ornament as I have suggested gives a legitimate excuse for dividing any garden walk that has a tendency to weary the eye by its persistent straightness. Some years ago no one ever thought it necessary to make an excuse for a curve in a garden walk. The gardener simply got out his iron and cut out whatever curve he pleased on each side, and the thing was done. But nowadays one must have a natural reason for every deflection in a path; and an obstacle is introduced only to be avoided.

I need hardly say that there are pergolas and pergolas. I saw one that cost between two and three thousand pounds in a garden beyond Beaulieu, between Mont Boron and Monte Carlo--an ideal site. It was made up of porphyry columns with Corinthian carved capitals and wrought-iron work of a beautiful design, largely, but not lavishly, gilt, as a sort of frieze running from pillar to pillar; a bronze vase stood between each of the panels, and the handles of these were also gilt. I have known of quite respectable persons creating quite presentable pergolas for less money. In that favoured part of the world, however, everything bizarre and extravagant seems to find a place and to look in keeping with its surroundings.

The antithesis to this gorgeous and thoroughly beautiful piece of work I have seen in many gardens in England. It is the “rustic” pergola, a thing that may be acquired for a couple of pounds and that may, with attention, last a couple of years. Anything is better than this--no pergola at all is better than this. In Italy one sees along the roadsides numbers of these structures overgrown with vines; but never yet did I see one that was not either in a broken-down condition or rapidly approaching such a condition; although the poles are usually made of chestnut which should last a long time--unlike our larch, the life of which when cut into poles and inserted in the cold earth does not as a rule go beyond the third year.

Rut there is something workable in this line between the three-thousand-pounder of the Riviera, and the three-pounder of Clapham. If people will only keep their eyes open for posts suitable for the pillars of a pergola, they will be able to collect a sufficient number to make a start with inside a year. The remainder of the woodwork I should recommend being brought already shaped and creosoted from some of those large sawmills where such work is made a speciality of. But there is no use getting anything that is not strong and durable, and every upright pillar should be embedded in concrete or cement. For one of my own pergolas--I do not call them pergolas but colonnades--I found a disused telegraph pole and sawed it into lengths of thirty inches each. These I sank eighteen inches in the ground at regular intervals and on each I doweled two oak poles six inches in diameter. They are standing well; for telegraph posts which have been properly treated are nearly as durable as iron. All the woodwork for this I got ready sawn and “dipped” from a well-known factory at Croydon. It is eighty feet long and paved throughout. One man was able to put it up inside a fine fortnight in the month of January.

A second colonnade that I have is under forty feet in length. I made one side of it against a screen of sweetbrier roses which had grown to a height of twenty feet in five years. The making of it was suggested to me by the chance I had of buying at housebreaker's price a number of little columns taken from a shop that was being pulled down to give place, as usual, to a new cinema palace.

An amusing sidelight upon the imperiousness of fashion was afforded us when the painter set to work upon these. They had once been treated in that form of decoration known as “oak grained”--that pale yellow colour touched with an implement technically called a comb, professing to give to ordinary deal the appearance of British oak, and possibly deceiving a person here and there who had never seen oak. But when my painter began to burn off this stuff he discovered that the column had actually been papered and then painted and grained. This made his work easy, for he was able to tear the paper away in strips. But when he had done this he made the further discovery that the wood underneath was good oak with a natural grain showing!

Could anything be more ridiculous than the fashion of sixty or seventy years ago, when the art of graining had reached its highest level? Here were beautiful oak columns which only required to be waxed to display to full advantage the graceful natural “feathering” of the wood, papered over and then put into the hands of the artist to make it by his process of “oak-graining” as unlike oak as the basilica of St. Mark is unlike Westminster Abbey!

But for a large garden where everything is on a heroic scale, the only suitable pergola is one made up of high brick or stone piers, with massive oak beams for the roof. Such a structure will last for a century or two, improving year by year. The only question to consider is the proper proportions that it should assume--the relations of the length to the breadth and to the height. On such points I dare not speak. The architect who has had experience of such structures must be consulted. I have seen some that have been carried out without reference to the profession, and to my mind their proportions were not right. One had the semblance of being stunted, another was certainly not sufficiently broad by at least two feet.

In this connection I may be pardoned if I give it as my opinion that most pergolas suffer from lack of breadth. Six feet is the narrowest breadth possible for one that is eight feet high to the cross beams. I think that a pergola in England should be paved, not in that contemptible fashion, properly termed “crazy,” but with either stone slabs or paving tiles; if one can afford to have the work done in panels, so much the better. In this way nothing looks better than small bricks set in herring-bone patterns. If one can afford a course of coloured bricks, so much the better. The riotous gaiety of colour overhead should be responded to in some measure underfoot.

There is no reason against, but many strong reasons for, interrupting the lines of a long pergola by making a dome of open woodwork between the four middle columns of support--assuming that all the rest of the woodwork is straight---and creating a curved alcove with a seat between the two back supports, thus forming at very little extra expense, an additional bower to the others which will come into existence year by year in a garden that is properly looked after.

When I was a schoolboy I was brought by my desk-mate to his father's place, and escorted round the grounds by his sister, for whom I cherished a passion that I hoped was not hopeless. This was while my friend was busy looking after the nets for the lawn tennis. There were three summer-houses in various parts of the somewhat extensive grounds, and in every one of them we came quite too suddenly upon a pair of quite too obvious lovers.

The sister cicerone hurried past each with averted eyes--after the first glance--and looked at me and smiled.

We were turning into another avenue after passing the third of these love-birds, when she stopped abruptly.

“We had better not go on any farther,” said she.

“Oh, why not?” I cried.

“Well, there's another summer-house down there among the lilacs,” she replied.

We stood there while she looked around, plainly in search of a route that should be less distracting. It was at this moment of indecision that I gazed at her. I thought that I had never seen her look so lovely. 1 felt myself trembling. I know that my eyes were fixed upon the ground--I could not have spoken the words if I had looked up to her--she was a good head and shoulder taller than I was:--

“Look here, Miss Fanny, there may be no one in the last of the summer-houses. Let us go there and sit--sit--the same as the others.”

“Oh, no; I should be afraid,” said she.

“Oh, I swear to you that you shall have no cause, Miss Fanny; I know what is due to the one you love; you will be quite safe--sacred.”

“What do you know about the one I love?” she asked--and there was a smile in her voice.

“I know the one who loves you,” I said warmly.

“I'm so glad,” she cried. “I know that he is looking for me everywhere, and if he found us together in a summer-house he would be sure to kill you. Captain Tyson is a frightfully jealous man, and you are too nice a boy to be killed. Do you mind running round by the rhododendrons and telling Bob that he may wear my tennis shoes to-day? I got a new pair yesterday.”

I went slowly toward the rhododendrons. When I got beyond their shelter I looked back.

I did not see her, but I saw the sprightly figure of a naval man crossing the grass toward where I had left her, and I knew him to be Commander Tyson, R.N.

Their second son is Commander Tyson, R. N., today.

But from that hour I made up my mind that a properly designed garden should have at least five summer-houses.

I have just made my fifth.

CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

I am sure that the most peaceful part of our Garden of Peace is the Place of Roses. The place of roses in the time of roses is one bower. It grew out of the orchard ground which I had turned into a lawn in exchange for the grassy space which I had turned into the House Garden. The grass came very rapidly when I had grubbed up the roots of the old plums and cherries. But then we found that the stone-edged beds and the central fountain had not really taken possession, so to speak, of the House Garden. This had still the character of a lawn for all its bedding, and could not be mown in less than two hours.

And just as I was becoming impressed with this fact, a gentle general dealer came to me with the inquiry f a tall wooden pillar would be of any use to me. I could not tell him until I had seen it, and when I had seen it and bought it and had it conveyed home I could not tell him.

It was a fluted column of wood, nearly twenty feet high and two in diameter, with a base and a carved Corinthian capital--quite an imposing object, but, as usual, the people at the auction were so startled by having brought before them something to which they were unaccustomed, they would not make a bid for it, and my dealer, who has brought me many an embarrassing treasure, got it fur the ten shillings at which he had started it.

It lay on the grass where it had been left by the carters, giving to the landscape for a whole week the semblance of the place of the Parthenon or the Acropolis; but on the seventh day I clearly saw that one cannot possess a white elephant without making some sacrifices for that distinction, and I resolved to sacrifice the new lawn to my hasty purchase. There are few things in the world dearer than a bargain, and none more irresistible. Rut, as it turned out, this was altogether an exceptional thing--as a matter of fact, all my bargains are. I made it stand in the centre of the lawn and I saw the place transformed.

It occupied no more than a patch less than a yard 'n diameter; but it dominated the whole neighbourhood. On one side of the place there is a range of shrubs on a small mound, making people who stand by the new pend of water-lilies believe that they have come to the bottom of the garden; on another side is the old Saxon earthwork, now turned into an expanse of things herbaceous, with a long curved grass path under the ancient castle walls; down the full length of the third side runs a pergola, giving no one a glimpse of a great breadth of rose-beds or of the colonnade beyond, where the sweet-briers have their own way.

There was no reason that I could see (now that I had set my heart on the scheme) why I should not set up a gigantic rose pillar in the centre of the lawn and see what would happen.

What actually did happen before another year had passed was the erecting of a tall pillar which looked so lonely in the midst of the grass--a lighthouse marking a shoal in a green sea--that I made four large round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty feet, and set up a nine-foot pillar in the centre of each, planting climbing roses of various sorts around it, hoping that in due time the whole should be incorporated and form a ring of roses about the towering centre column.

It really took no more than two years to bring to fruition my most sanguine hopes, and now there are four rose-tents with hundreds of prolific shoots above the apex of each, clinging with eager fingers to the wires which I have brought to them from the top of the central pillar, and threatening in time to form a complete canopy between forty and fifty feet in diameter.

In the shade of these ambitious things one sits in what I say is the most peaceful part of the whole place of peace. Even “winter and rough weather” may be regarded with complacency from the well-sheltered seats; and every year toward the end of November Rosamund brings into the house some big sprays of ramblers and asks her mother if there is any boracic lint handy. He jests at scars who never felt an Ards Rover scrape down his arm in resisting lawful arrest. But in July and August, looking down upon the growing canopy from the grass walk above the herbaceous terrace, is like realising Byron's awful longing for all the rosy lips of all the rosy girls in the world to “become one mouth” in order that he might “kiss them all at once from North to South.” There they are, thousands and tens of thousands of rosy mouths; but not for kisses, even separately. Heywood, who, being a painter, is a thoroughly trustworthy consultant on all artistic matters, assures me that Byron was a fool, and that his longing for a unification of a million moments of æsthetic delight was unworthy of his reputation. There may be something in this. I am content to look down upon our eager roses with no more of a longing than that September were as far off as Christmas.

It was our antiquarian neighbour who, walking on the terrace one day in mid-July, told us of a beautiful poem which he had just seen in the customary corner of the _Gazette_--the full name of the paper is _The Yardley Gazette, East Longuorth Chronicle, and Nethershire Observer_, but one would no more think of giving it all its titles in ordinary conversation than of giving the Duke of Wellington all his. It is with us as much the _Gazette_ as if no other Gazette had ever been published. But it prints a copy of verses, ancient or modern, every week, and our friend had got hold of a gem. The roses reminded him of it He could only recollect the first two lines, but they were striking:--

“There's a bower of rose by Bendameer's stream

And the nightingale sings in it all the night long.”

Bendameer was some place in China, he thought, or perhaps Japan--but for the matter of that it might not be a real locality, but merely a place invented by the poet. Anyhow, he would in future call the terrace walk Bendameer, for could any one imagine a finer bower of roses than that beneath us? He did not believe that Bendameer could beat it.