CHAPTER IX

THE GARDEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

LAYING out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a WILLIAM

liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; and its object, like that of all the liberal arts is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the control of good sense; that is, those of the best and wisest: but speaking with more precision, it is to assist Nature in moving the affections, and surely, as I have said, the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature; who have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, and most independent, the most ennobling, connected with Nature and human life. No liberal art aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a class: the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does so; the true servants of the arts pay homage to the human kind as impersonated in unwarped enlightened minds. If this be so when we are merely putting together words or colours, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty and harmony, of the joy and happiness of living creatures; of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied actions and energies, as benign in the spirit that animates them, as they are beautiful and grand in that form and clothing which is given to them for the delights of our senses.-Letter to Sir G. Beaumont, 1805.

YET

WORDSWORTH

(1770-1850).

SCOTT

ET now that these ridiculous anomalies have fallen into SIR general disuse, it must be acknowledged that there exist WALTER gardens, the work of Loudon, Wise, and such persons as laid out (1771-1832). ground in the Dutch taste, which would be much better subjects

for modification than for absolute destruction. Their rarity now entitles them to some care as a species of antiques, and unquestionably they give character to some snug, quiet, and sequestered situations which would otherwise have no marked feature of any kind. We ourselves retain an early and pleasing recollection of the seclusion of such a scene. A small cottage, adjacent to a beautiful village, the habitation of an ancient maiden lady, was for some time our abode. It was situated in a garden of seven or eight acres, planted about the beginning of the eighteenth century, by one of the Millars, related to the author of the Gardener's Dictionary, or, for aught we know, by himself. It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which access was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks, calling itself a labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a splendid Platanus, or oriental plane-a huge hill of leaves-one of the noblest specimens of that regularly beautiful tree which we remember to have seen.1 In different parts of the garden were fine ornamental trees which had attained great size, and the orchard was filled with fruit-trees of the best description. There were seats and trellis-walks and a banqueting house. Even in our time this little scene, intended to present a formal exhibition of vegetable beauty, was going fast to decay. The parterres of flowers were no longer watched by the quiet and simple friends under whose auspices they had been planted, and much of the ornament of the domain had been neglected or destroyed to increase its productive value. visited it lately, after an absence of many years. Its air of retreat, the seclusion which its alleys afforded, was entirely gone; the huge Platanus had died, like most of its kind, in the beginning of this century; the hedges were cut down, the trees stubbed up and the whole character of the place so much destroyed, that I

1 It was under this Platanus that Scott first devoured Percy's Reliques. I remember well being with him, in 1820, or 1821, when he revisited the favourite scene, and the sadness of his looks, when he discovered that the huge hill of leaves was no more.'-J. G. Lockhart: Life of Sir Walter Scott.

was glad when I could leave it.'-Essay on Landscape Gardening. (Quarterly Review, 1828.)

UT out of doors as much regard was shown to beauty as to ROBERT SOUTHEY

BUT

utility. Miss Allison and Betsey claimed the little garden (1774-1843)in front of the house for themselves. It was in so neglected a state when they took possession that, between children and poultry and stray pigs, not a garden flower was left there to grow wild and the gravel walk from the gate to the porch was overgrown with weeds and grass, except a path in the middle which had been kept bare by use. On each side of the gate were three yew-trees, at equal distances. In the old days of the Grange they had been squared in three lessening stages, the uppermost tapering pyramidally to a point. While the house had been shorn of its honours, the yews remained unshorn; but when it was once more occupied by a wealthy habitant, and a new gate had been set up and the pillars and their stone balls cleaned from moss and lichen and short ferns, the unfortunate evergreens were again reduced to the formal shape in which Mr Allison and his sister remembered them in their childhood.

This was with them a matter of feeling, which is a better thing than taste. And indeed the yews must either have been trimmed, or cut down, because they intercepted sunshine from the garden, and the prospect from the upper windows. The garden would have been better without them, for they were bad neighbours: but they belonged to old times, aud it would have seemed a sort of sacrilege to destroy them.

Flower-beds used, like beds in the kitchen-garden, to be raised a little above the path, with nothing to divide them from it, till about the beginning of the seventeenth century; the fashion of bordering them was introduced either by the Italians or the French. Daisies, periwinkles, feverfew, hyssop, lavender, rosemary, rue, sage, wormwood, camomile, thyme, and box were used for this purpose: a German horticulturist observes that hyssop

1 See Note on page 234.

was preferred as the most convenient; box, however, gradually obtained the preference. The Jesuit Rapin claims for the French the merit of bringing this plant into use, and embellishes his account of it by one of those school-boy fictions which passed for poetry in his day, and may still pass for it in his country. He describes a feast of the rural Gods. .

Adfuit et Cybele, Phrygias celebrata per urbes, etc.

The fashion which this buxom Flora introduced had at one time the effect of banishing flowers from what should have been the flower garden; the ground was set with box in their stead, disposed in patterns more or less formal, some intricate as a labyrinth and not little resembling those of Turkey carpets, where Mahommedan laws interdict the likeness of any living thing, and the taste of Turkish weavers excludes any combination of graceful forms. One sense at least was gratified when fragrant herbs were used in these 'rare figures of composures,' or knots as they were called, hyssop being mixed in them with thyme, as aiders the one to the other, the one being dry, the other moist. Box had the disadvantage of a disagreeable odour; but it was greener in winter and more compact in all seasons. To lay out these knots and tread them required the skill of a master-gardener: much labour was thus expended without producing any beauty. The walks between them were sometimes of different colours; some would be of lighter or darker gravel, red or yellow sand; and when such materials were at hand, pulverised coal, and pulverised shells.

Such a garden Mr Cradock saw at Bordeaux no longer ago than the year 1785; it belonged to Monsieur Rabi, a very rich Jew merchant, and was surrounded by a bank of earth, on which there stood about two hundred blue and white flower-pots; the garden itself was a scroll-work cut very narrow, and the interstices filled with sand of different colours to imitate embroidery; it required repairing after every shower, and if the wind rose, the eyes were sure to suffer. Yet the French admired this and exclaimed, Superbe! magnifique !

Neither Miss Allison nor her niece would have taken any

pleasure in gardens of this kind, which had nothing of a garden but the name. They both delighted in flowers; the aunt because flowers to her were 'redolent of youth,' and never failed to awaken tender recollections; Betsey for an opposite reason: having been born and bred in London, a nosegay there had seemed always to bring her a foretaste of those enjoyments for which she was looking forward with eager hope. They had stocked their front-garden therefore with the gayest and the sweetest flowers that were cultivated in those days; larkspurs, both of the giant and dwarf species, and of all colours; sweetwilliams of the richest hues; monk's-hood for its stately growth; Betsey called it the dumbledore's delight, and was not aware that the plant, in whose helmet, rather than cowl-shaped flowers that busy and best-natured of all insects appears to revel more than in any other, is the deadly aconite of which she read in poetry : the white lily, and the fleur-de-lis; pœonies, which are still the glory of the English garden: stocks and gillyflowers which make the air sweet as the gales of Arabia; wall-flowers, which for a while are little less fragrant, and not less beautiful; pinks and carnations added their spicy odours; roses, red and white, peeped at the lower casements, and the jessamine climbed to those of the chambers above. You must nurse your own flowers, if you would have them flourish, unless you happen to have a gardener, who is as fond of them as yourself.

Eve was not busier with hers in Paradise, her 'pleasant task injoined,' than Betsey Allison and her aunt, from the time that early spring invited them to their cheerful employment, till late and monitory autumn closed it for the year.

'Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these'; and Solomon in all his wisdom never taught more wholesome lessons than these silent monitors convey to a thoughtful mind and an understanding heart. 'There are two books,' says Sir Thomas Browne, 'from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature-that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all. Those that never saw him in the one have dis