Part 6
How well an artist knows the value of grey-leaved plants, and their use in pictorial gardening in the way of giving colour-value by close companionship, to tender pinks and lilacs, and, above all, to whites! A patch of white bloom is often too hard and sudden and inharmonious to satisfy the trained eye, but led up to and softened and sweetened by masses of neighbouring tender grey it takes its proper place and comes to its right strength in the well-ordered scheme. Lavender, Lavender-cotton (_Santolina_), Catmint, Pinks and Carnations, and the Woolly Woundwort (_Stachys_) with some other plants of hoary foliage, do this good work. In this garden the Woundwort, there known by its old Midland name of “Our Saviour’s Blanket,” throws up its grey-pink heads of bloom from a thick carpet of rather large leaves, silvery soft with their thick coating of long white down. Here a groundwork of it leads to the group of white Peach-leaved Bell-flower on the right and to the tall white Gnaphalium, a plant of kindred woolliness, on the left, while the precious grey quality runs through the left-hand flower-group by means of the downy-coated pods of the earlier-blooming Lupins, purposely left among the later flowers for this and for their handsome form.
How finely the Orange Lilies tell against the background of the holly hedge, at the path-end cut into an arbour, may well be seen in the picture, and how kindly and gracefully the Greengage Plum-tree bends over and plays its appointed part.
Such a flower border makes many a picture in the hands of a garden-artist. His knowledge of the plants, their colours, seasons, habits and stature, enables him to use them as he uses the colours on his palette.
How grandly the tall Delphiniums grow in this strong soil. A little of the colour has been lost owing to technical difficulties of reproduction, for the blue is purer and stronger in effect both in the original picture and in nature than is here shown. They are grouped, as blue flowers need, with contrasts of yellow and orange; with yellow Daisies and the feathery Meadow-rue (_Thalictrum_), and the tall yellow Aconite and nearly white Campanulas, woolly Stachys and purple Bell-flowers beyond. Only one small patch of brighter colour, the scarlet of Lychnis chalcedonica, is allowed here. On the other side is the loose-growing and always pictorial white Mallow (_Sidalcea candida_), taking some weeks to produce its crop of flowers that, like Foxgloves and most of the flowers of the tall-spiked habit of growth, begin to bloom below, following upward till they finish at the top.
Some sort of garden knowledge is so generally professed in these days, and so much more gardening of the better kind is being attempted, that people are gradually learning the advantage of planting in good groups of one thing at a time. The older way of putting one each of the same plant at regular intervals along a border--like buttons on a waistcoat--is now no longer tolerated, but a great deal has yet to be learnt. Even planting in bold groups, however good the plants, will be ineffective if not absolutely unfortunate, if relationships of colouring are not understood. The safest plan is to plant in harmonies more or less graduated as to the warm colours, such as full yellow with orange and scarlet, and to plant blues with contrasts of yellows and any white flowers. Then delightful effects may be obtained with masses of grey foliage, such as Lavender, Lavender-cotton, and Stachys, and white Pink, with flowers that have colourings of tender pink, white, lilac and purple. To acquire a colour eye is an education in itself, founded on the needful natural aptitude, a gift that is denied to some people even if they are not actually colour-blind. But it is a precious possession where it occurs, and all the better
when it has been so well trained that the eye is enabled to appreciate the utmost refinements of colour-values, and when this education has been carried to the point necessary for the artist, of justly estimating the colour _as it appears to be_. This is the most difficult thing to learn; to see colour as it is, is quite easy; any one not colour-blind can do this; but to see it as it appears to be needs to be learnt, for upon this acquired proficiency depends the power of the artist to interpret the colours of objects and to represent them in their right relation to each other.
There is another good double flower-border in this pleasant garden. In the sunny month of August the fine Summer Daisies (_Chrysanthemum maximum_), Phloxes and Lavender are in beauty, and some bloom remains upon the climbing Roses. The Box-edging, stout and strong, can withstand the temporary encroachments of some of the border flowers, for in such a garden, rule is relaxed whenever such latitude tends to beauty. Here and there, where the little edging shrub showed signs of unusual vigour, it has been allowed to grow up on the understanding that it shall submit to the shears, which clip it into rounded ball-shapes of two sizes, one upon another, like loaves of bread.
A garden like this, of moderate size, and needing no troublesome accessories of glasshouses, or even frames, and very little outside labour, is probably the very happiest possession of its kind. As the seasons succeed each other new pictures of flower beauty are revealed in constant succession. After the day’s work in the best of the daylight is over, its owner turns to it for pleasant labour or any such tending as it may need. Every group of plants meets him with a friendly face, for each one was planted by his own hands. His watchful eye observes where anything is amiss and the needful aid is immediately given.
In a great garden this vigilant personal care of plants as individuals is impossible. However able a man the head gardener may be, or however much he may love and wish to cherish the flowers under his care, his duties and responsibilities are too many and too onerous to admit of his being able to enjoy this intimate fellowship; but in the humbler garden the close relationship of man and flowers, with all its beneficent and salutary serviceableness to both, seems to be exactly adjusted.
Such a garden it is that fulfils its highest purpose; that giving of the pleasure--the rich reward of the loving toil and care that have gone to its making; every plant or group in it doing its appointed work in its due season--that giving of “sweet solace” according to the well-fitting wording of our far-away ancestors.
And when the day’s work is done, and the light just begins to fail, no one knows better than the artist that then is the best moment in the garden--when the colours acquire a wonderful richness of “subdued splendour” such as is unmatched throughout the lighter hours of the long summer day. Then it is that the flowers of delicate texture that have grown faint in the full heat, raise their heads and rejoice; that the tall evening Primrose opens its pale wide petals and gives off its faint perfume; that the little lilac cross-flowers of the night-scented Stock open out and show their modest prettiness and pour forth their enchanting fragrance. This early evening hour is indeed the best of all; the hour of loveliest sight, of sweetest scent, of best earthly rest and fullest refreshment of body and spirit.
LEVENS
There is perhaps no garden in England that has been so often described or so much discussed as that at Levens in Westmorland, the home of Captain Jocelyn Bagot.
It was laid out near the beginning of the eighteenth century by a French gardener named Beaumont. There is nothing about it of the French manner, as we know it, for it is more in the Dutch style of the time, and has become in appearance completely English; according perfectly with the beautiful old house, and growing with it into a complete harmony of mellow age, whose sentiment is one of perfect unison both within and without.
Forward of the house-front, in a space divided by intersecting paths into six main compartments, is the garden. Flower-borders, box-edged on both sides, form bordering ornaments all round these divisions. The inner spaces are of turf. At the angles and at equal points along the borders are strange figures cut in yew and box. Some are like turned chessmen; some might be taken for adaptations of human figures, for one can trace a hat-covered head--one of them wears a crown--shoulders and arms and a spreading petticoat. Some of the yews, and these mostly in the more open spaces of grass or walk, rise four-square as solid blocks, with rounded roof and stemless mushroom finial. These have for the most part arched recesses, forming arbours. One of the tallest, standing clear on its little green, is differently shaped, being round in plan above and the stems bared all round below, with an encircling seat.
No doubt many of the yews have taken forms other than those that were originally designed; the variety of shape would be otherwise too daring; but these recklessly defiant escapes from rule only add to the charm of the place, presenting a fresh surprise at every turn. The play of light and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped evergreens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow, cold, almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising brilliancy of golden-green--often all bright gold-green when the young shoots are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of its many wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities of form, offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light, whose play upon them is infinitely varied. Then the beholder, passing on and looking back, sees the whole thing coloured and lighted anew. This quantity of Yew and Box clipped into an endless variety of fantastic forms has often been criticised as childish. Would that all gardens were childish in so happy a way! Is not the joy and perfectly innocent delight that the true lover of flowers feels in a good garden in itself akin to childishness, and is not a fine old English garden such as this, with its numberless incidents that stir and gratify the imagination, and its abundance of sweet and beautiful flowers, just the one that can give that happiness in the greatest degree? Does not the oldest of our legends, so closely bound up with our youngest apprehension of religious teaching, tell us of the earliest of our race of whom we have any record or even tradition, living happily in a garden in a state of childish innocence? Why should a garden not be childish?--perhaps when it truly deserves such a term it is the highest praise it could possibly have!
However this may be the fact remains that those who own this garden of many wonders, and watch and tend it with unceasing love and reverence, and others who have had the happiness of working in it for many days together, find it a place that never wearies, but only continues day by day to disclose new beauties and new delights. Doubtless it is a garden that cannot be fairly judged from a hasty glance or a few hours’ visit. Like many of the places and things that we call inanimate--though to one who knows and loves a garden nothing is more vitally living--such a place has its moods and can frown upon an unsympathetic beholder.
The garden is filled with many Roses and well-grown hardy plants;
those especially of tall stature making a fine effect. The Rose garden has White Pinks in its outer beds. Immediately beyond the garden’s bounds is wild ground of a beautiful character. The river Kent, a rock-strewn stream with steep wooded banks, flows within fifty yards of the house. The contrast is a great and a delightful one. Wild parkland and untamed river without; and within the walls ordered restraint; then again, the quiet of the wide bowling-green, with its dark clipped hedges, and beyond it a long, tree-shaded walk.
Precious, indeed, are the few remaining gardens that have anything of the character of this wonderful one of Levens; gardens that above all others show somewhat of the actual feeling and temperament of our ancestors. They show personal discrimination combining happily with common-sense needs; walls and masses of yew and box to make shelter from the violence of wind, and yet to admit the welcome sunlight; so to provide the best conditions in the inner spaces for the growing of lovely flowers. Then the shaping of some of the yews into strange forms, shows perhaps the whimsical humour of some one of a line of owners, preserved, with careful painstaking, by his descendants.
A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the minds of several of such possessors--men who have not only thankfully paced its green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have held it in that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure to be some living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, or its beauty. The original design may have become in some degree lost, but unless the doings of the several owners have been in the way of destruction or radical alteration, or something of obvious folly or bad taste, the garden will have gained in a remarkable degree that quality of human interest that is not easy to define but that is clearly perceptible, not only to a trained critic but to any one who has knowledge of its most vital needs and sympathy with its worthiest expression. This precious utterance is not confined to this or to any one special kind of gardening, but may pervade and illuminate almost any one of the many ways in which men find their pleasure and delight in ordering the sheltered seclusion of their home grounds, and enjoying the varied beauty of tree and bush and flower.
It is only in gardens of the most rigidly formal type, such as are full of architectural form and detail and admit of no alteration of the original plan, that personal influence can least be exercised. This is no doubt the reason why such gardens, correctly beautiful though they may be, are those that give in smallest measure that wonderful sense of the purest and most innocent happiness, that of all earthly enjoyments seems to be the most directly God-given.
Yet, even in such gardens, it is not impossible that some impress of the personal influence may be beneficently given, but the range of operation is extremely limited, the greatest knowledge and ability are needed, with the sure action of the keenest and most restrained judgment.
CAMPSEY ASHE
In Eastern Suffolk, within a few miles of the sea, is this, the country home of the Hon. William Lowther.
The house, replacing an older one that occupied the same site, is of brick and stone, built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A moat, inclosing an unusually large area, and formerly entirely encompassing the house and garden, is now partly filled up; but one long arm remains, running the greater part of the length of the house and garden; a shorter length bounding the inclosed garden on the opposite side. The longer length of moat approaches the house closely on its eastern face, and then forms the boundary of a large and beautifully-kept square lawn, with fine old cedars and other trees. Following this southward is a double walled garden, with the main paths, especially those of the nearer division, bordered with flowers. Beyond these again is the portion of the garden that forms the subject of the picture--a small parterre of box-edged beds with a row of old clipped yews beyond. This leads westward to a grove of trees, with a statue also girt with trees standing in an oval in the midmost space.
The garden has beautiful incidents in abundance, but is somewhat bewildering. Traces of the older gardening constantly appear; but their original cohesion has been lost. The moat, always an important feature, ends suddenly at four points. Garden-houses and gazebos, that usually come at salient points with determinate effect, seem to have strayed into their places. Sections of the park seem to have broken loose and lost themselves in the garden. The garden is not the less charming in detail, but is impossible to gather together or hold in a clear mental grasp, from the absence of general plan.
Besides the old clipped yews in the picture, others, apparently of the same age, inclose an oval bowling-green. In form they are as if they had been at first cut as a thick hedge with a roof-like sloping top. From this, at fairly regular intervals, spring great rounded masses, that, with the varying vigour of the individual trees and the continual clipping without reference to a fixed design, have asserted themselves after their own fashion. Though symmetry has been lost, the place has gained in pictorial value. Four ways lead in; the larger bosses guarding the entrances.
So it is throughout this charming but puzzling garden. Ever a glimpse of some delightful old-world incident, and then the baffled effort to fit together the disjointed members of what must once have been a definite design.
The portion of the garden that is simplest and clearest is a broad walk opposite the house, on the further side of the moat, and raised some ten feet above it; backed by an old yew hedge some twenty feet high, of irregular outline. Just opposite the middle of the house the line of the hedge is interrupted to give a view into the park, with a vista between groups of fine elms; but the hedge stretches away southward the whole length of the long arm of the moat and the walled gardens. At regular intervals along the old hedge are ranged, on column-shaped pedestals, busts that came from an Italian villa. About half way along steps lead down to the moat, where there is a ferry-punt propelled by an endless rope, such as is commonly used in the fenlands. At the end of the long walk is a curious seat with a high carved back, that looks as if it had once formed part of an old ship or state barge, in the bygone days of two hundred years ago, when a fine style of bold and free wood-carving was lavishly used about their raised poops and stern-galleries.
Towards the end of the second division of the walled garden is an old orangery or large garden house, that probably was in connexion with the scheme of the yew hedges. It has the usual piercing with large lights but no top-light. The original purpose of these buildings was the housing of orange and other tender trees in tubs, and the fact of its presence might possibly throw some light on the mystery of the garden’s former planning.
Good hardy flowers are everywhere in abundance. Specially beautiful in the later summer is a grand pink Hollyhock of strong free habit, with the flowers of that best of all shapes--with wide, frilled outer petals and centres not too tightly packed.
It would be interesting work for some one with a knowledge of the garden design of the past three centuries in England to try to reconstruct the original plan of some one time. Though on the ground the various remaining portions of the older work cannot be pieced together, yet, if these were put on paper to proper scale, it might be possible to come to some general conclusions as to the way in which the garden was originally, and again perhaps subsequently, laid out. Some of the remaining portions of the older work of quite different dates may now seem to be of the same age, but the expert would probably be able to discriminate. The result of such a study would be worth having even if actual reconstruction were not contemplated.
CLEEVE PRIOR
Near a quiet village in Warwickshire, and in close relation to its accompanying farm buildings, is this charming old manor house. It is not upon a main road, but stands back in its own quiet place on rising ground above the Avon. Everything about it is interesting and quite unspoilt. The wooden hand-gate, with its acorn-topped posts, that stands upon two semi-circular steps may not have been of the pattern of the original gate--it has an eighteenth-century look--but it is just right now. It leads into a half dark, half light, double arcade of splendid old clipped yews. Looking from the gate they seem to be tall walls of yew to right and left, showing the projecting porch of the house at the end; but, passing along, there are seen to be openings between every two trees, each of which gives a charming picture of the lawns and simple flower beds to right and left. The path is paved with stone flags; the garden is bounded with a low wall of the local oolite limestone that rock-plants love. A few thin-topped old fruit-trees, their stems clothed with ivy, are another link between the past and present, and the somewhat pathetic evidence of their having long passed their prime and being on the downward path, is in striking contrast with the robust vigour of the ancient yews, already some centuries old, and looking as if they must endure for ever.
Eight yews stand on either side--sixteen in all. They are known as the twelve Apostles and the four Evangelists. The names may have belonged to them from the time of their planting, for the whole place belonged in old days to Evesham Abbey, and is pervaded with monastic memory and tradition. This may also account for the excellence of the
buildings, for the old monks were grand constructors, and their structures were not only solid but always beautiful.
One of the older of these at Cleeve Prior is a large circular dovecote of stone masonry with tiled roof and small tiled cupola. Such buildings were not unfrequent in the old days, and many of them remain. Sometimes they are round in plan, sometimes four-, sometimes eight-sided. Occasionally there is a central post inside, set on pivots to revolve easily, with lateral arms carrying a ladder that reaches nearly to the walls, so that any one of the many pigeon-holes can be reached.
To the left of the Apostles’ Garden, as you stand facing the house, a little gate leads into the vegetable garden. It has narrow grass paths bordered with old-fashioned flowers. A further gate leads into the orchard. Behind the house is the home close with some fine trees; on two other sides are the farm buildings, yard and rickyard.
How grandly the flowers grow in these old manor and farm gardens! How finely the great masses of bloom compose, and how beautifully they harmonise with the grey of the limestone wall and the wonderful colour of the old tiled roof; both of them weather and lichen-stained; each tile a picture in itself of grey and orange and tenderest pink.
The yews have got over their paler green colour of the early summer when the young shoots are put forth, and have settled into the deep green dress that they will wear till next May. For the time is September; wheat harvesting is going on and the autumn flowers are in full vigour. There are Dahlias, the great annual Sunflowers and the tall autumn Daisy; Lavender and Michaelmas Daisies, with sweet herbs for the kitchen, just as it should be in such a garden.