Part 7

Some of these old pot-herbs are beautiful things deserving a place in any flower garden. Sage--for instance--a half shrubby plant with handsome grey leaf and whorled spikes of purple flowers; a good plant both for winter and summer, for the leaves are persistent and the plant well clothed throughout the year. Hyssop is another such handsome thing, of the same family, with a quantity of purple bloom in the autumn, when it is a great favourite with the butterflies and bumble bees. This is one of the plants that was used as an edging plant in gardens in Tudor days, as we read in Parkinson’s “Paradisus,” where Lavender-cotton, Marjoram, Savoury and Thyme are also named as among the plants used for the same purpose. Rue, with its neat bluish-green foliage, is also a capital plant for the garden where this colour of leafage is desired. Fennel, with its finely-divided leaves and handsome yellow flower, is a good border plant, though rarely so used, and blooms in the late autumn. Lavender and Rosemary are both so familiar as flower-garden plants that we forget that they can also be used as neat edgings, if from the time they are young plants they are kept clipped. Borage has a handsome blue flower, as good as its relation the larger _Anchusa_. Tansy, best known in gardens by the handsome _Achillea Eupatorium_, was an old inmate of the herb garden. Sweet Cicely (_Myrrhis odorata_) has beautiful foliage, pale green and fern-like, with a good umbel of white bloom, and is a most desirable plant to group with and among early blooming flowers. And we all know what a good garden flower is the common Pot Marigold.

The old farm buildings at Cleeve Prior are scarcely less beautiful than the manor-house itself, and are remarkable for the timber erections, open at the sides but with tiled roofs, that give sheltered access, by outside stairways, to the lofts.

Throughout England the older farmhouses and buildings are full of interest, not only to architects, but to many who are in sympathy with good and simple construction, and have taken the pleasant trouble to learn enough about it to understand how and why the buildings were reared. And in these restless days of hurry and strain and close competition in trades, and bad, cheap work, it is good to pass a quiet hour in wandering about among structures set up four or even five centuries ago by these grand building monks. The present writer had just such a pleasure not long ago in the South of England, where a large group of monastic farm buildings stands within sound of the wash of the sea. They are on sloping ground, inclosing three sides of a square; a wall, backed with trees, forming the fourth side. On the upper level is a great barn; a much greater, the tithe barn, being opposite it on the lower. Buildings containing stables, cattle-sheds and piggeries connect the two. Between these and the wall opposite is a spacious yard; across the middle is a raised causeway dividing the yard into two levels.

The barns are of grand masonry. Some of the stones, next above the plinth--a feature that adds so much to the dignity of the building, and by its additional width, to its solidity--measure as much as four feet six inches in length by twenty inches in height. In every fifth course is a row of triangular holes for ventilation, such as every brick or stone-built barn must have. They are cleverly arranged as to the detail of the manner of their building, and though only intended for use have a distinctly ornamental value. Where the walls rise at the gable ends they are corbelled out at the eaves and carried up some two feet above the line of the rafters, finishing in a wrought stone capping, thus stopping the thatch. For the buildings are, and always have been, thatched with straw, the ground around being good corn-land, a rich calcareous loam.

There is a delightful sense of restfulness about these fine solid buildings, built for the plainest needs of the community of the material nearest to hand, in the simply right and therefore most beautiful way. With no intentional ornament, they have the beauty of sound, strong structure and unconsciously right proportion. There is also a satisfaction in the plain evidence of delight in good craftsmanship, and in the unsparing use of both labour and material.

CONDOVER

Condover Hall near Shrewsbury is a stately house of important size and aspect--one of the many great houses that were reared in the latter half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Its general character gives the impression of severity rather than suavity, though the straight groups of chimneys have handsome heads, and the severe character is mitigated on the southern front by an arcade in the middle space of the ground floor. The same stern treatment pervades the garden masonry. No mouldings soften the edges of the terrace steps; parapets and retaining walls, with the exception of the balustrade of the main terrace, are without ornament of light and shade; plainly weathered copings being their only finish. Only here and there, a pier that carries a large Italian flower-pot has a little more ornament of rather massive bracket form.

The garden spaces are large and largely treated, as befits the place and its environment of park-land amply furnished with grand masses of tree-growth. On the southern side of the house, where the ground falls away, are two green flats and slopes, leading to a lower walk parallel with their length and with the terrace above. The steps in the picture are the top flight of a succession leading to these lower levels. The lower and narrower grassy space has a row of clipped yews of a rounded cone-shape. The upper level has a design of the same, but of different patterns.

The balustrade in the picture is old, probably of the same date as the house; much of the other stonework is modern. The circular seat on a raised platform, with its stone-edged flower-beds, has a very happy effect, and its yew-hedge backing joins well into the older yews that

overlap the parapet of the steps; their colour contrasting distinctly with that of the more distant Ilex, a magnificent example of a tree that deserves more general use in English gardens. The parterre above the steps and on a level with the house has box hedges, after the Italian manner, three feet high and two feet wide. These, with some of the yew hedges, were planted a hundred years ago, though much of the garden, with its ornaments of fine Italian flower-pots, was the work of the former owner, the late Mr. Reginald Cholmondeley, a man of powerful personality and fine taste.

The most important part of the garden lies to the west of the house, where there is a double garden of stiff pattern with high box borders and clipped evergreens. At a right angle to this, the spectator, standing at some distance westward, and looking back towards the east and straight with the space between the pair of gardens of angular design, sees a broad space flanked on either side by a row of handsome upright yews. The ground between is a flower garden of large diamond-shaped beds in two sizes, with cleverly-arranged green edgings. But now that the large Irish yews have grown to their early maturity, dominating the garden and insisting on their own strong parallel lines, it is open to question whether it would not have been better to have had a wide, clear middle space of green straight down the length, with the flowers in shapely, ordered masses to right and left. The close succession of large beds gives the impression of impediments to comfortable progress.

It was wise to leave the Irish yews unclipped. Though the common English yew is the tree that is of all others the most docile to the discipline of training and shearing, the upright growing variety will have none of it. In some fine English gardens they are clipped, always with disastrous effect. They will only take one form: that of an ugly swollen bottle, or lamp-chimney with a straight top. Their own form is quite symmetrical enough for use in any large design.

SPEKE HALL

There are, alas! but few now remaining of the timber buildings of the sixteenth century that are either so important in size or so well-preserved as this beautiful old Lancashire house.

They were built at a time when the country had settled down into a peaceable state; when houses need no longer be walled and loopholed against the probable raids of enemies; when their windows might be of ample size and might look abroad without fear. Many of them, however, were still moated, for a moat was of use not only for defence but as a convenient fish-pond, and as a bar to the depredations of wolves, foxes and rabbits.

The advance of civilisation also brought with it a greater desire for home comforts, and the genius of the country, unspoilt, unfettered, undiluted by that mass of half-digested knowledge of many styles that has led astray so many of the builders of modern days, by a natural instinct cast these dwellings into forms that we now seek out and study in the effort to regain our lost innocence, and that in many cases we are glad to adopt anew as models of what is most desirable for comfort and for the happy enjoyment of our homes.

Still, in these days we cannot build such houses anew without a suspicion of strain or affectation. When they were reared, oak was the building material most readily to be obtained, and carpenters’ work, already well developed in the construction of roofs, now given free scope in outer walls as well, seemed to revel in the new liberty, and oak-framed houses grew up into beautiful form and ornament in such a way as has never been surpassed in this country.

It was satisfying and beautiful because every bit of ornamental detail grew out of the necessary structure. The plainer framing of cottage and farmhouse became enriched in the manor-house into a wealth of moulding and carving and other kinds of decoration. External panel ornament gained a rich quality by the repetition of symmetrical form, while the overhanging of the successive stories and the indentations between projecting wings and porches threw the various faces of the building into interesting masses of light and shade. Then, in delightful and restful contrast to the “busy” wall-spaces, are the roofs, with their long quiet lines of ridge and their covering of tile or stone, painted by the ages with the loveliest tinting of moss and lichen.

Within, these fine old wooden houses show the good English oak as worthily treated as without. For the whole structure is of wood from end to end, built as soundly and strongly as were the old wooden ships. The inner walls, where they were not panelled with oak, were hung with tapestry. Ceilings of the best rooms were wrought with plaster ornament; lesser rooms showed the beams and often the thick joists that fitted into them and upheld the floor above. Where, as was usual, there was a long gallery in the topmost floor, its ceiling would show a tracery of oak with plaster filling, partly following the line of the roof. The whole structure, blossoming out in its more important parts into beautiful decorative enrichment, showed the worker’s delight in his craft, and his mastery of mind and hand in conceiving and carrying out the possibilities offered by what was then the most usual building material of the country.

Such another house as Speke is Moreton Old Hall in Cheshire, but the latter is still more richly decorated, with carved strings, some of which were painted, and wood and plaster panels of great elaboration, and lead-quarried windows of large size and beautiful design.

The destruction of large numbers of these timber buildings in the eighteenth century can never be sufficiently deplored. There was a time when the fashion for buildings of classical form was spreading over England, when they were considered barbarous relics of a bygone age, and when the delightful gardens that had grown up around them were alike condemned and in many cases destroyed.

There is not a large garden at Speke, but just enough of simple groups of flowers to grace the beautiful timber front. The picture shows that the gardening is just right for the place; not asserting itself overmuch but doing its own part with a restful, quiet charm that has a right relation to the lovely old dwelling.

GARDEN ROSES

Those who follow the developments of taste in modern gardening, cannot fail to perceive how great has been the recent increase in the numbers of Roses that are for true beauty in the garden.

It is only some of the elders among those who take a true and lively interest in their gardens who know what a scarcity of good things there was thirty years ago, or even twenty, compared with what we have now to choose from. Still, of the Roses commonly known as garden Roses, there were even then China Roses, Damask, Cabbage and Moss, Sweetbriars and Cinnamon Roses, and the free-growing Ayrshires, which are even now among the most indispensable.

But the wave of indifferent taste in gardening that had flooded all England with the desire for summer bedding plants, to the almost entire exclusion of the worthier occupants of gardens, had for a time pushed aside the older garden Roses. For whereas in the earlier half of the nineteenth century these good old Roses were much planted and worthily used, with the coming of the fashion for the tender bedding plants they fell into general disuse; and, with the accompanying neglect of many a good hardy border plant, left our gardens very much the poorer, and, except for special spring bedding, bare of flowers for all the earlier part of the year.

Now we have learnt the better ways, and have come to see that good gardening is based on something more stable and trustworthy than any passing freak of fashion. And though the foolish imp fashion will always pounce upon something to tease and worry over, and to set up on a temporary pedestal only to be pulled down again before long, so also it assails and would make its own for a time, some one or other point of garden practice. Just now it is the pergola and the Japanese garden; and truly wonderful are the absurdities committed in the name of both.

But the sober, thoughtful gardener smiles within himself and lets the freaks of fashion pass by. If he has some level place where a straight covered way of summer greenery would lead pleasantly from one quite definite point to another, and if he feels quite sure that his garden-scheme and its environment will be the better for it, and if he can afford to build a sensible structure, with solid piers and heavy oak beams, he will do well to have a pergola. If he has travelled in Japan, and lived there for some time and acquired the language, and has deeply studied the mental attitude of the people with regard to their gardens, and imbibed the traditional lore so closely bound up with their horticultural practice, and is also a practical gardener in England--then let him make a Japanese garden, if he will _and can_; but he will be the wiser man if he lets it alone. Even with all the knowledge indicated, and, indeed, because of its acquirement, he probably would not attempt it. When a Japanese garden merely means a space of pleasure-ground where plants, natives of Japan, are grown in a manner suitable for an English garden, there is but little danger of going wrong, but such danger is considerable when an attempt is made to garden in the Japanese manner.

This is a wide digression from the subject of garden Roses, and yet excusable in that it can scarcely be too often urged that any attempt to practise anything in horticulture for no better reason than because it is the fashion, can only lead to debasement and can only achieve futility.

Now that there are large numbers of people who truly love their gardens, and who show evidence of it by giving them much care and thought and loving labour, the old garden Roses have been sought for and have been restored to their former place of high favour. And our best nurserymen have not been slow to see what would be acceptable in well-cared-for gardens throughout the length and breadth of the land; so that the last few years have seen an extraordinary activity in the production of good Roses for garden effect. The free-growing _Rosa polyantha_ of the Himalayas has been employed as a seed or pollen-bearing parent, and from it have been developed first the well-known Crimson

Rambler, and later a number of less showy but much more refined flowers of just the right kind for free use in garden decoration.

Valuable hybrids have also been raised from the Tea Roses, one of the best known of them being _Viscountess Folkestone_, the subject of the picture; a grand Rose for grouping in beds or clumps, and one that yields its large, loose, blush-white flowers abundantly and for a long season. This merit of an extended blooming season runs through the greater number of the now long list of varieties of the beautiful hybrid Teas.

Some of the new seedling Tea Roses have nearly single flowers, and are none the less beautiful, as those wise folk well know who grow _Corallina_ and the lovely white _Irish Beauty_, and its free-blooming companion _Irish Glory_. These also are plants that will succeed, as will most of the hybrid Teas, in some poor hot soils where most Roses fail.

Then for rambling over banks we have _Rosa wichuraiana_ and its descendants; among these the charming _Dorothy Perkins_, good for any free use.

Those who garden on the strong, rich loams that Roses love will find that many of the so-called show Roses are grand things as garden Roses also; indeed, for purely horticultural purposes there is no need of any such distinction. The way is for a number of Roses to be grown on trial, and for a keen watch to be kept on their ways. It will soon be seen which are those that are happiest in any particular garden, and how, having regard to their colour and way of growth, they may best be used for beauty and delight.

In the garden where the picture was painted, _Viscountess Folkestone_ has an undergrowth of Love-in-a-mist, that comes up year after year, and with its quiet grey-blue colouring makes a charming companionship with the faint blush of the Roses.

PENSHURST

The gardens that adorn the ancient home of the Sidneys are, as to the actual planting of what we see to-day, with repairs to the house and some necessary additions to fit it for modern needs, the work of the late Lord de L’Isle with the architect George Devey, begun about fifty years ago. It was a time when there was not much good work done in gardening, but both were men of fine taste and ability, and the reparation and alteration needed for the house, and the new planting and partly new designing of the garden could not have been in better hands.

The aspect and sentiment of the garden, now that it has grown into shape--its lines closely following, as far as it went, the old design--are in perfect accordance with the whole feeling of the place, so that there seems to be no break in continuity from the time of the original planting some centuries ago. Such as it is to-day, such one feels sure it was in the old days--in parts line for line and path for path, but throughout, just such a garden as to general form, aspect, and above all, sentiment, as it must have been in the days of old. For when it was first planted the conditions that would have to be considered were always the same; requirement of shelter from prevailing winds; questions relating to various portions, as to whether it would be desirable to welcome the sunlight for the flowers’ delight, or to shut it out for human enjoyment of summer coolness--all such grounds of motive were, just as now, deliberated by the men of old days, whose decisions, actuated by sympathy with both house and ground, would bring forth a result whose character would be the same, whether thought out and planned to-day or four centuries ago.

So it is that we find the old work at Penshurst confirmed and renewed,

and new work added of a like kind, such as will make use of the wider modern range of garden plants, while it retains the dignity and grandeur of the fine old place.

The house stands on a wide space of grass terrace commanding the garden. On a lower level is a large quadrangular parterre, with cross paths. In each of its square angles is a sunk garden with a five-foot-wide verge of turf and a bordering stone kerb forming a step. The beds within, filled with good hardy plants, have bold box edgings eighteen inches high and a foot thick, that not only set off the bright masses of flowers within, but have in themselves an air of solidity and importance that befits the large scale of the place. They represent in their own position and on their lesser scale somewhat of the same character as the massive yew hedges, twelve feet high and six feet through, that do their own work in other parts of the garden.

These grand yew hedges and solid box borders have responded well to good planting and tending, for the late Lord de L’Isle knew his work and did it thoroughly. Not only was the ground well prepared, but for several years after planting the young trees were provided with a surface dressing that prevented evaporation and provided nutriment. This was carefully attended to, not only in the case of the yews but of the box edgings also.

The cross-walks of the parterre do not meet in the middle, but sweep round a circular fountain basin, in the centre of which stands a statue of what may be a young Hercules, brought from Italy by Lord de L’Isle. The slender grace of the figure might at first suggest a youthful Bacchus, but the identity in such a statue is easily established by looking for one or other of the characteristic attributes of Hercules; these usually are the lion’s skin, the upright-growing hair on the forehead, the poplar wreath or the battered, flattened ears. But the statue stands too far from the walk to be exactly identified.

That the nearer portions of the garden are on the same lines as the older planting is shown by an engraving in Harris’s “Kent,” where the parterre is, now as then, bounded by terraces on two of its sides, the house side and that of the adjoining churchyard, to which access is gained by a beautiful gabled gateway of brick and stone, the work of Tudor times.

The old churchyard has its own beauty, while the church and a fine group of elms are seen from the garden above the wall, and take their own beneficent place in the garden landscape.