CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Eugene Montillon The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012145060 Cornell University Library SB 451.B65 The formal garden In England, 3 1924 012 145 060 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND THE- •FORMAL- GA-RDErvr- •IK -ENGLAND- •BY • REGITSTALD -i^LOMFIELD- •ATsTD •F-IlsriGO-THOMAS- LOKDON • MAOMILLATSr -^-CO • •1892- PREFACE This short account of the Formal Garden in England does not profess to be exhaustive. The field is a wide one and includes subjects any one of which could only be fully handled in a special study. An attempt, however, has been made to break up ground and to clear away misconceptions by giving so much of its history as will show the general character of the formal garden in England, its absolute separation from landscape gardeni ng, and the extent and variety of design which it involves. It is to the design of the garden that the scope of the work more particularly refers. No attempt has been made to deal with horticulture, with the right methods of growing plants and flowers and trees : these are fully discussed by the proper authorities, in existing works on gardening ; but the question of design, of the treatment of the grounds as a whole as well as vi PREFACE in detail, is an entirely distinct one, which has been confused with that of horticulture, and finally superseded by it. Horticulture stands to garden design much as building does ^ to architecture ; the two are connected, but very far from being identical. This book has been written entirely from the stand-point of the designer, and therefore contains little or no reference to the actual methods of horticulture. The illustrations have been drawn by Mr. Thomas, the letterpress has been written by Mr. Blomfield from materials collected con- jointly. The writer begs to thank Mr. Seeley for permission to reprint passages from an article on " Gardens," contributed by him to The Portfolio, December 1889. A list of the works referred to will be found in Appendix lU. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Formal Method and the Landscape Gardener i CHAPTER II The Formal Garden in England . . 21 CHAPTER III The Formal Garden — Continued . . 50 CHAPTER IV The End of the Formal Garden and the Land- scape School ....... 75 CHAPTER V The Courts, Terraces, Walks .... 93 CHAPTER VI Knots, Parterres, Grass -Work, Mounts, Bowl- ing-Greens, Theatres . . . . -125 CONTENTS CHAPTER VII PAGE Fish - Ponds, Pleaching, Arbours, Galleries, Hedges, Palisades, Groves .... 144 CHAPTER VIII Garden Architecture — Bridges, Gatehouses, Gateways, Gates, Walls, Balustrades, Stairs 168 CHAPTER IX Garden Architecture — Continued: Garden-Houses, Aviaries, Columbaries, Dove-Cots, Hot-Houses, Carpenter's Work, Fountains, Sundials, Statuary . ..... 189 CHAPTER X Conclusion ... . . . 223 APPENDIX I . . .237 „ II .... 240 „ III ... . . 242 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 1. Haddon Hall ... i8 2. From " The Romance of the Rose" . 23 3. From " The Romance of the Rose" . . 25 4. Crispin de Pass . . . 29 5. From The Gardener's Labyrinth . 38 6. From The Gardener s Labyrinth . 39 7. Knots, from Markham's Country Farm . 44 8. From Lawson's New Orchard . t^-j 9. Wilton, from De Caux ... -55 10. Badminton, from Les Delices de la Grande Bretagne . . . . " 63 11. Lead Vase, Melbourne, Derbyshire . . 66 12. From Logan — Merton College, Oxford . 68 13. A Garden, from J. Worlidge . . . -71 14. Topiary Work at Levens Hall, Westmoreland 73 Doves, Risley, Derbyshire ... 74 The Terrace Stairs, Prior Park, near Bath . 75 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 15. Yrora Axk.yni'% Gloucestershire . . . .. TJ 16. From London and Wise — A Scarecrow of Bells and Feathers . . . . . -7^ 17. Barncluith, Lanarkshire .... 9° Garden and Terrace, Montacute, Somerset . 93 18. Examples of Fore Courts — from Kip's Views . 98 19. Saresden, from Kennett . . . . .100 20. Terraced Garden, Kingston House, Bradford- on-Avon . . . . . . .105 21. Hales Place 108 22. Rycott, in the County of Oxford . . .110 23. The Terrace, Risley Hall, Derbyshire . .112 24. From The Gardener's Labyrinth . . .121 25. Ambrosden, from Kennett . . . .123 View of Fore Court, showing one of the Pavilions, Montacute . . . . . .124 26. The Garden, New College, Oxford . .126 27. Knots, from Markham . . . . .129 The Garden, Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire 144. 28. From Markham's Cheape and Good Husbandrie . 146 29. The Old Gardens at Brickwall, near Nor- thiam, Sussex . . . . . .148 30. The Fishpond, Wrest, Bedfordshire . .149 31. From The Gardener's Labyrinth . . -153 32. Garden, from Crispin de Pass . . . -155 33. The Yew Walk, Melbourne, Derbyshire . 157 ILLUSTRATIONS 34. Hedge, from Markham's Country Farm 35. Wrest, from Kip ..... The Water Pavilion, Wrest, Bedfordshire Garden Gate, Avebury, Wiltshire 36. The Palladian Bridge, Wilton, Wiltshire . 37. Eyam, Derbyshire . ... 38. Gate Piers, Canons Ashby, Northampton- shire ...... 39. Coley Hall, Yorkshire .... \o. Swarkeston Hall, Derbyshire . 41. Garden Gate, Tissington, Derby 42. The Terrace, Brymton d'Evercy, Somerset 43. Pitmidden, Aberdeenshire The Old Garden and Orangery, Mount Edg cumbe, Cornwall .... 44. Garden-House, King's College, Cambridge 45. „ St. John's College, Oxford 46. „ King's College, Cambridge 47. „ Christ Church, Oxford 48. The Banquet-House, Swarkeston 49. Boxted Hall, Suffolk .... 50. Garden-House on the Wey, Surrey 51. Isaac Walton's Fishing-House, Dovedale . 52. Dove-cote at Rousham, Oxford 53. Dove-cote, St. John's, Oxford . 54. Garden-House, Christ Church, Oxford . 158 165 167 168 171 175 176 177 177 179 184 187 189 190 190 191 191 192 193 194 195 197 198 201 xii ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 55. The Green Court, Canons Ashby, Northamp- tonshire ..... . 204 56. Fountain at Bolsover, Derbyshire . . . 207 57. Sundial, Wrest, Bedfordshire . . . 209 58. Sundial at Cheeseburn, Northumberland . 211 59. White Marble Sundial, Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire . . . . . .213 60. Lead Figure of Perseus, Melbourne, Derby- shire ....... 214. 61. Stone Vase at Hampton Court . . . 216 62. Lead Figure of Cupid, Melbourne, Derby . 218 63. Lead Vase at Hampton Court . . 219 64. Lead Vase, Penshurst, Kent . . . 221 65. Penshurst Place, Kent : A Modern Garden . 231 66. Sundial in a Scotch Garden . . . .233 67. The Plan of M. Tallard's Garden at Notting- ham . . . . . ■ 241 CHAPTER I THE FORMAL METHOD AND THE LANDSCAPE GARDENER The Formal System of Gardening has suffered from a question-begging name. It has been labelled " Formal " by its ill-wishers ; and though, in a way, the terrri expresses the orderly result at which the system aims, the implied reproach is disingenuous. The history of this method of dealing with gardens will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but as some misunder- standing prevails as to its intention, and any quantity of misrepresentation, it will be well to clear the ground by a statement of the principles and standpoint of the Formal School as com- pared with Landscape Gardening. The question at issue is a very simple one. Is the garden to be considered in relation to the house, and as an integral part of a design which depends for its success on the combined effect of house and garden ; or is the house to be ignored in dealing with the garden ? The latter is the 2 . THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. position of the landscape gardener in actual fact. There is some affectation in his treatises of recognising the relationship between the two, but his actual practice shows that this admission is only borrowed from the formal school to save appearances, and is out of court in a method which systematically dispenses with any kind of system whatever. The formal treatment of gardens ought, perhaps, to be called the architectural treatment of gardens, for it consists in the extension of the principles of design which govern the house to the grounds which surround it. Architects are often abused for ignoring the surroundings of their buildings in towns, and under conditions which make it impossible for them to do other- wise ; but if the reproach has force, and it certainly has, it applies with greater justice to those who control both the house and its sur- roundings, and yet deliberately set the two at variance. The object of formal gardening is to bring the two into harmony, to make the house grow out of its surroundings, and to prevent its being an excrescence on the face of nature. The building cannot resemble anything in nature, unless you are content with a mud -hut and cover it with grass. Architecture in any shape has certain definite characteristics which it cannot get rid of ; but, on the other hand, you\ can lay out the grounds, and alter the levels, and plant hedges and trees exactly as you I. THE FORMAL METHOD 3 please ; in a word, you can so control and modify the grounds as to bring nature into harmony with the house, if you cannot bring the house into harmony with nature. The harmony arrived at is not any trick of imitation, but an affair of a dominant idea which stamps its impress on house and grounds alike. Starting, then, with the house as our datum, we have to consider it as a visible object, what sort of thing it is that we are actually looking at. A house, or any other building, considered simply as a visible object, presents to the eye certain masses arranged in definite planes and proportions, and certain colours distributed in definite quality and quantity. It is regular, it presents straight lines and geometrical curves. Any but the most ill-considered efforts in building — anything with any title to the name of architecture — implies premeditated form in accordance with certain limits and necessities. However picturesque the result, however bravely some chimney breaks the sky-line, or some gable contradicts another, all architecture implies restraint, and if not symmetry, at least balance. There is order everywhere and there is no escaping it. Now, suppose this visible object dropped, let us say from heaven, into the middle of a piece of ground, and this piece of ground laid out with a studied avoidance of all order, all balance, all definite lines, and the result must be a hopeless disagreement between 4 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. the house and its surroundings. This very effect can be seen in the efforts of the landscape gardener, and in old country houses, such as Barrington Court, near Langport, where the gardens have not been kept up. There is a gaunt, famished, incomplete look about these houses, which is due quite as much to the felt want of relation between the house and its grounds, as to a.ny associations of decay. Something, then, of the quality of the house must be found in the grounds. The house will have its regular approach and its courtyard — rectangular, round, or oval — its terrace, its paths straight and wide, its broad masses of unbroken grass, its trimmed hedges and alleys, its flower- beds bounded by the strong definite lines of box-edgings and the like — all will show the quality of order and restraint ; the motive of the house suggests itself in the terrace and the gazebo, and recurs, like the theme in a coda, as you pass between the piers of the garden gate. Thus the formal garden will produce with the house a homogeneous result, which cannot be reached by either singly. Now let us see how the landscape gardener deals with the problem of house and grounds. It is not easy to state his principles, for his system consists in the absence of any ; and most modern writers on the subject lead off with hearty and indiscriminate abuse of formal I. THE FORMAL METHOD 5 gardening, after which they incontinently drop 'the question of garden design, and go off at a tangent on horticulture and hot -houses. A great deal is said about nature and her beauty, and fidelity to nature, and so on ; but as the landscape gardener never takes the trouble to state precisely what he means by nature, and indeed prefers to use the word in half a dozen different senses, we are not very much the wiser so far as principles are concerned. The axiom on which the system rests is this — " Whatever nature does is right ; therefore let us go and copy her." Let us obliterate the marks of man's handiwork (and particularly any suspicion of that bad man, the architect), and though we shall manipulate the face of nature with the greatest freedom, we shall be carefiil to make people believe that we have not manipulated it at all. Various rules are given as to the proper method of " copying nature's graceflil touch " — the favourite phrase of the landscapist. The older writers, such as Wheatly (^Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770), had a theory which was at least intelligible as a theory. They con- sidered the landscape gardener as a painter on a colossal scale. By alterijig natural scenery he was to produce such landscapes as are admired in the works of the old masters. The method of procedure as explained by Wheatly is this. You determine a priori the abstract character- istics of any natural object ; and then, on 6 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. considerations evolved from your inner con- sciousness, you alter the surrounding scenery to bring out these characteristics. For instance, the characteristics of rocks are determined to be "dignity, terror, and fancy." By way of enhancing dignity, Wheatly tells us to cut away the ground to make them steeper ; and to refine their appearance we are to cover them up with " shrubby and creeping plants." Or again, if the scenery is wild, we may make it wilder by making a ruined stone bridge. Straight lines and unbroken masses of foliage are to be avoided at all costs, in order to secure variety of effect, " and the planter is to plant, trees of different foliage at stated intervals, by way of reproducing the colours of the painter's palette." These views are repeated in modern treatises on landscape gardening, with, however, a curious inversion. Wheatly's idea was that we should saturate our minds with the composi- tions of the old masters, and then proceed to alter actual scenery till it resembled their pictures ; but the modern landscapist tells us that we are to copy nature — that is, study a piece of scenery of natural formation, and then reproduce this in our gardens. Wheatly admitted design of some sort, while his successors direct every effort to imitating the absence of design. The latter insist that we are not to copy nature literally, but only in her spirit, whatever that may mean. Mr. Robinson I. THE FORMAL METHOD 7 says, "We should compose from nature as land- scape artists do. It is still his (the landscape gardener's) privilege to make everchanging pictures out of nature's own material — sky and trees, water and flowers and grass. If he would not prefer this to painting in pigments, he has no business to be a landscape gardener. The aim should be never to rest till the garden is a reflex of nature in her fairest moods." For instance, because nature is assumed never to show straight lines, all paths are to be made crooked, and presumably Mr. Robinson's dictum that " walks should be concealed as much as possible, and reduced to the most modest dimensions" is based on the state of a virgin forest ; the argument perhaps running thus, because in a virgin forest there are no paths at all, let us in our acre and a half of garden make as little of the paths as possible. Deception is a primary object of the landscape gardener. Thus to get variety, and to deceive the eye into supposing that the garden is larger than it is, the paths are to wind about in all directions, and the lawns are not to be left in broad expanse, but dotted about with pampas grasses, foreign shrubs, or anything else that will break up the surface. As was said by a witty Frenchman, " Rien n'est plus facile que de dessiner un pare Anglais ; on n'a qu'a enivrer son jardinier, et a suivre son trace." Mr. Milner, a recent writer on landscape 8 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. gardening, has the courage to define what he calls his art : " The art of landscape gardening may be stated as the taking true cognisance of nature's means for the expression of beauty, and so disposing those means artistically as to co-operate for our delight in given conditions." This is a hard saying, put in plain English it seems to amount to this : " Fix upon certain passages that you like in natural scenery, and then reproduce them under artificial conditions." By observation of natural scenery the landscape gardener is to form certain generalisations to guide his practice. Here are some of the results of Mr. Milner's studies : "A calculated shadow on a lawn is a resource of value for the artistic use of natural effect. -In every situation a beyond implies discovery and affects the imagination ; the area is circumscribed of which we can take cognisance too readily and com- pletely ; imagination is then confiised or frustrated. The beauty of water, in motion or still, is of universal acceptance. The created character of a water feature must be consonant with the surrounding land, for fitness to surrounding conditions is a measure of beauty to both ; a lake expresses spaciousness, but much of its charm is due to its outline." There is a curious irrelevance about these apothegms which reminds one of Ollendorf: " My aunt is beautiful, but have you seen my sister's cat .'' " I. THE FORMAL METHOD 9 As to any system, Mr. Milner throws up the sponge at once. He admits in his first chapter that landscape gardening can have no set of fixed principles. He says generally that we are not to copy nature, but " to adapt and garner her beauties." Yet his advice as to treatment of details is point-blank copy. "The lawn of our garden " should present the appearance of a " grassy glade in a wood," appear, in short, to be exactly what it is not. For this is another of the objects of the landscape gardener ; his aim is not to show things as they are, but as they are not. His first ambition is to make his inter- ference with nature look " natural -like " ; his second, to produce a false impression on the spectator and make him think the grounds to be twice as big as they are. " Bridges may be contrived to excite the impression of length ; " islands on a lake can be used " to mask the ends." " The removal of some (trees) in particular situations, with a coincident lowering of the bank, will give an effect of lengthening the water area." So in regard to trees, " a hill is made to appear higher if its summit be planted." Or again, " an enclosure pure and simple, even though it be of leaves and not a brick wall, gives a shut-in and cramped feeling which needlessly militates against expressions of beauty and expanse that may be deftly gained from outside the boundary lines," — that is, by deftly cutting holes in the line of trees we lead lo THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. people to suppose that our neighbour's estate 'belongs to us. Hitherto no mention has been made of architecture in this description of landscape gardening. Indeed, it is the object of the landscape gardener to exclude the architect from the garden, for he feels, like Demetrius, the silversmith, that his craft is in danger to be set at naught ; and having succeeded in expelling the architect a hundred and fifty years ago, he is naturally unwilling to let him in again. Mr. Milner does point out that the house should stand on a terrace, but proceeds to stultify his own admission by stating that the terrace " differs from the garden proper, which, though fine in calculated detail of its plan, should express by its breadth of treatment most unmistakably that nature has triumphed ove^ art, because art has subtly tutored the development of nature," which, if it means anything, must mean that when you enter the garden you are to leave all thought of architecture behind you. Thus, the substantial difference between the two views of gardening is this. The formal school insists upon design ; the house and the grounds should be designed together and in relation to each other; no attempt should be made to conceal the design of the garden, there being no reason for doing so, but the bounding lines, whether it is the garden wall or the lines of paths and parterres, should be shown frankly and unreservedly, and the garden will be I. THE FORMAL METHOD ii treated specifically as an enclosed space to be laid out exactly as the designer pleases. The landscape gardener, on the other hand, turns his back upon architecture at the earliest oppor- tunity and devotes his energies to making the garden suggest natural scenery, to giving a false impression as to its size by sedulously concealing all boundary lines, and to modifying the scenery beyond the garden itself, by planting or cutting down trees, as may be necessary to what he calls his picture. In matters of taste there is no arguing with a man. Probably people with a feeling for design and order will prefer the formal garden, while the land- scape system, as it requires no knowledge of design, appeals to the average person who " knows what he likes," if he does not know anything else. One or two charges, however, which have been brought against the formal system, ought to be dealt with here. In the first place, it is said to be unnatural to lay out a garden in straight lines and regular banks and to clip your hedges. The landscape ■ gardener appears to suppose that he has a monopoly of nature. Now, what is " nature " and what is " natural " in relation to gardens ? " II faut se mefier du mirage de le mot ' naturel ' lorsqu'il s'agit des nuances de la sensibilite. Outre qu'il sert de masque, le plus souvent, aux inintelligences des ignorants ou aux hostilites des gens vulgaires, il 12 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. a le malheur de ne pas envelopper de significa- tion precise au regard du philosophe."^ " Nature " must mean the earth itself and the forces at work in the earth, and the waters of the earth and sky, and the trees, flowers, and grass which grow on the earth, no matter whether planted by man or not. A clipped yew-tree is as much a part of nature — that is, subject to natural laws, as a forest oak ; but the landscapist, by ap- pealing to associations which surround the personification of nature, holds up the clipped yew-tree to obloquy as something against nature. So far as that goes, it is no more unnatural to clip a yew-tree than to cut grass. Again, " nature " is said to prefer a curved line to a straight, and it is thence inferred that all the lines in a garden, and especially paths, should be curved. Now as a matter of fact in nature — that is, in the visible phenomena of the earth's surface — there are no lines at all; "a line" is simply an abstraction which conveniently ex- presses the direction of a succession of objects which may be either straight or curved. " Nature " has nothing to do with either straight lines or curved ; it is simply begging the question to lay it down as an axiom that curved lines are more " natural " than straight. As a matter of fact, whatever " naturalness " there may be about it applies quite as well to a straight path and a plain expanse of grass ; and 1 Paul Bourget. I. THE FORMAL METHOD 13 it is open to us to say that the natural man would probably prefer a straight path to a zigzag, and that when his eye seeks wearily for the rest of some quiet breadth of lawn and the welcome finality of a wall or hedgerow, he is " naturally " bored by the landscapist with his curves and his clumps. The word " natural " can only mean some- thing belonging to nature, or something done in accordance with nature's laws, as, for instance, planting a tree with its roots underground instead of upside down ; but when the landscapist uses the word " natural," as when he calls his system a " purely artistic and natural " style, he means by it a style which imitates the visible results of natural causes, as, for instance, the copy of a piece of natural rock in a rockery. Now there is nothing more natural, properly speaking, about this than there is in the forma- tion of a grass bank in the shape of a horse- shoe. In fact, this vaunted naturalness of landscape gardening is a sham ; instead of leaving nature alone, the landscapist is always struggling to make nature lend itself to his deceptions. Mr. Milner gives unconsciously two instances of this. In a chapter on " Public Parks and Cemeteries " he tells us how, at Preston, a railway embankment, which runs across the public park, was made to look quite natural by " planting and irregular lines of walk and turf. Rockwork even has been introduced 14 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. to foster the idea that the towering mass is only one part of an old cliff." And at Glossop the landscape gardener was still more heroic. The park was divided by a ravine, with a stream running along the bottom. Accordingly, " the beautifal and natural parts of the ravine were picked out and made the most of, whilst, in order to convert the parts into a whole, the sides were in places levelled down, and the stream covered," — a somewhat scurvy treatment of nature by the landscape gardener. This is all very well, but what becomes of nature .'' As Sir Uvedale Price said of Brown and his clumps of trees, " While Mr. Brown was removing old pieces of formality, he was establishing new ones of a more extensive and mischievous consequence." ^ The claims of landscape gardening to be the true " natural style " will not bear investigation. When Addison and Pope sneered at the formal garden and praised " the amiable simplicity of unadorned nature," the logical conclusion would have been to condemn the garden altogether, and to let the house, if a house was to be allowed at all, rise from the heart of the thicket, or sheer from the rough hillside. It is hard to see how there is less interference with nature in an untidy grotto of shells and rocks ^ The rest of this paragraph and other passages relating to Kent, Brown, and the landscape school are reprinted from an article " On Gardens," contributed to the Portfolio for December 1889 by Mr. Blomfield. I. THE FORMAL METHOD 15 than in a comfortable red brick gazebo, and the entire extent of masonry used by Kent in his temples and grottoes at Stowe, must have been at least equal to the amount used by Le Notre at Sceaux or Chantilly. To suppose that love of nature is shown by trying to produce the effects of wild nature on a small scale in a garden is clearly absurd ; any one who loves natural scenery will want the real thing ; he will hardly be content to sit in his rockery and suppose himself to be among the mountains. And again, some loyalty to her methods might have been expected of these enthusiasts for nature. It is surely flying in the face of nature to fill the garden with tropical plants, as we are urged to do by the writers on Landscape Gardening, ignoring the entire difference of climate, and the fact that a colour which may look superb in the midst of other strong colours, will look gaudy and vulgar amongst our sober tints, and that a leaf like that of the yucca, which may be all very well in its own country, is out of scale and character amidst the modest foliage of English trees. The formal gardener is, by his principles, entitled to do what he likes with nature, but the landscapist gets involved in all sorts of contradictions. He " copies nature's gracefiil touch," but under totally different conditions to the original ; so far, therefore, from being loyal to nature, he is engaged in a perpetual struggle to prove her 1 6 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. an ass. When we find him talking of " quite second-rate types of vegetation " (Mr. Robin- son), and finding fault with nature for having put a running stream like the Derwent among rocks instead of "a more temperate river " (Wheatly), we begin to suspect that his " truth " is a mere convention. Sainte-Beuve said of the Abbe Delille that he sincerely believed in his love of the fields " c'etait la mode de la nature, on admirait la campagne du seih des boudoirs." Our landscape gardeners take themselves too seriously ; as the late Charles Blanc pointed out, their pretensions to be natural have landed them in the worst of all vices — " le faux naturel." Two other charges are brought against the formal garden : first, that it involves much building and statuary ; secondly, that it requires much space. Neither the one nor the other is more necessary to the English formal garden than it is to the landscape garden. In regard to the first, Mr. Milner gives some very remarkable designs of rustic boat-houses, and summer-houses, and porticoes, as part and parcel of the landscape garden ; and it will appear that the wholesale use of temples, statues, grottoes, made ruins, broken bridges and the like, originated with the landscape gardener, not with the formal school. In point of fact, though statuary was used in the old English garden, it was used much less than in the French and Italian gardens. Those who I. THE FORMAL METHOD 17 attack the old English formal garden do not take the trouble to master its very considerable difference from the continental gardens of the same period. They seem to consider the English Renaissance as identical with the Italian, and the public, seeing such dismal fiascoes in the Italian style as the Crystal Palace Gardens and the basin at the head of the Serpentine, confuse these with the old English garden in one wholesale condemnation of the formal style. As to the matter of space, it is a mere assumption to lay it down that the formal style in England requires a great expanse of ground to be seen to perfection. This was necessary, no doubt, in the old French garden, but not in the English. Some of the best examples are on a comparatively small scale. The gardens at Haddon Hall are in three stages — the two top terraces only measure about 70 paces by 18 wide apiece, and the lower garden is only about 40 paces square. The beautiful old garden at Brickwall, in Sussex, all walled in, measures about 6^ paces by 55, and the kitchen and fruit garden about 90 by 50. The garden of Edzell Castle, in Forfarshire, all walled in, measures 5 8 paces long by 48 wide ; and a charming little flower garden at Stobhall, near Perth, in the old Scotch style, is not much more than half an acre in extent. In fact, if either style wants room it is the land- scape, for unrestricted space is of the essence of 1 8 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. natural scenery ; and, indeed, the only places in which its use appears tolerable are gardens such as those of Chatsworth, where the grounds are so large that there is a real suggestion of scenery sui generis, as of a wood in which clearings have TEatR^CE.: HADPOM HMJ^ I •DKHBYSHlREae Fig. I. — Haddon Hall. been made and the grass kept carefially trimmed. The word "garden" itself means an enclosed space, a garth or yard surrounded by walls, as opposed to unenclosed fields and woods. The formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines, is, strictly speaking, the only " garden " possible ; and it was not till the decay of architecture which began in the middle of THE FORMAL METHOD 19 the eighteenth century, that any other method of dealing with a garden was entertained. Before quitting the subject of gardens in general, a distinction should be laid down between garden design and horticulture. The landscape gardener treats of the two indis- criminately, yet they are entirely distinct, and it is evident that to plan out a garden the knowledge necessary is that of design, not of the best method of growing a gigantic goose- berry. Mr. Robinson justly remarks that " the profession of an architect has no one thing in common with that of horticulture," and infers from this that the French do wrong to give the control of the Luxembourg gardens to an architect. But the question is not one of horticulture at all, but of design ; and just as in the house, the designer is only indirectly concerned with the process of manufacturing his bricks, so in the garden the designer need not know the best method of planting every . flower or shrub included in his design ; the gardener should see to that. The horticulturist and the gardener are indispensable, but they should work under control, and they stand in the same relation to the designer as the artist's colourman does to the painter, or perhaps it would be fairer to say, as the builder and his workmen stand to the architect. The two ought to work together. The designer, whether professional or amateur, shc^ld lay ^ down the 20 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND i. main lines and deal with the garden as a whole, but the execution, such as the best method of forming beds, laying turf, planting trees, and pruning hedges, should be left to the gardener, whose proper business it is. CHAPTER II THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND In. his Essay on Gardening Horace Walpole says that we are " apt to think that Sir William Temple and King Wilham introduced the formal style, but by the description of Lord Burleigh's gardens at Theobald's, and of those at Nonsuch, we find that the magnificent, though false taste was known here as early as the reigns of Henry VIII. and his daughter." This is of a piece with Walpole's generalisations on Gothic architecture. He seems to have supposed that it was possible to import an exotic style wholesale into the midst of a people with a strong indigenous tradition. As a matter of fact, the advance in garden design in the sixteenth century was, like English architecture of the time, the result of the graft- ing of ideas brought back from Italy on the vigorous stock of mediaeval art, and the flilly- developed formal garden of the seventeenth 2 2 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. century retained features which were distinct survivals from the mediaeval garden. No instances remain of any mediaeval garden, and we have to form our ideas of it chiefly from illuminated manuscripts and early paint- ings. They were walled in, and supplied with water in conduits and fountains, and planted closely with hedges and alleys, as appears from the well-known lines written by James I. of Scot- land during his captivity at Windsor, 1405- 1424. " Now was there made, fast by the Tower's wall, A garden fair, and in corneris set Ane herbere green with wandes long and small, Railit about, and so with treeis set. Was all the place, and hawthorn hedges knet Thet lyf was non, walking there forbye. That might therein scarce any wight espye — So thick the boughis and the leaves green Beshaded all the alleys that there were — And myddis every herbere might be seene The sharp, green, sweete junipere." Mr. Hazlitt {^Gleanings in old Garden Literature) has collected what evidence there is of the mediaeval garden in contemporary literature, and unfortunately there is very little that throws much light on its arrange- ment. It was not, however, quite such an indiscriminate affair as Mr. Hazlitt suggests. In " The Romance of the Rose " in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 4425) there is a beautiful illumination of a garden, dating from the latter part of the fifteenth century. This garden is THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 23 divided into two by a fence, with a high gateway in the middle, but both gardens are surrounded by a wall with battlements. In the centre of Fig. 2. — From " The Romance of the Rose." '[ H / '' the left-hand garden is a fountain or conduit of copper, standing in a circular basin with a marble curb, and a little runnel of water in a marble channel. The right-hand garden shows 24 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. rectangular grass plots, in one of which is an orange-tree in a circular fence ; at the farther end is a fence of flowers on a wooden trellis — and peacocks are shown in the garden. Both gardens are evidently pleasure or flower gardens, as distinct from the kitchen garden. Mr. Hazlitt suggests that " arbour " was originally " herbarium," a space of grass planted with trees ; but the lines quoted above certainly refer to a " green arbour," and prove that by the beginning of the fifteenth century an arbour, in pretty much the sense that we should under- stand it, formed a regular part of the garden. On page 14'' of "The Romance of the Rose" there is a drawing of a garden with a wall about 7 feet high with battlements. On page 25 there is a drawing of a feature which seems to have been common in the mediaeval garden — a square embrasure was formed in the brickwork of the garden wall, with a seat round three sides about 2 feet wide and 18 above the ground ; the seat was of grass. On page 30 a bed of roses is shown instead of the grass seat ; on page 43 a green walk, such as is frequently referred to in old writers, is shown, formed on wooden framing with red and white roses. It is not, however, till the time of Henry VIII. that we come across any specific facts as to the arrangement of gardens. In 1520 Cardinal Wolsey began his great palace of Hampton Court. Wolsey's gardens, as de- THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 25 scribed by George Cavendish, resemble the picture given by James I. Fig. 3. — From " The Romance of the Rose.'' " My garden sweet, enclosed with walles strong, Embanked with benches to sytt and take my rest. The knottes so enknotted, it cannot be exprest, 26 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. With arbours and allys so pleasant and so duke, The pestilent ayres with flavors to repulse." The enclosing walls, the knottes or figured flower- beds, the arbours and alleys, formed part of the mediasval gardens ; but when, after Wolsey's death in 1530, the palace and gardens came into the hands of Henry VIII. signs appear of a new influence at work. Statues and figures of all kinds were introduced, and various fantastic features which were, no doubt, borrowed firom Italy. In the chapter -house accounts for the additions made by Henry VIII. ^ appear the following entries : — " Payd to Harry Corantt of Kyngston carver for making and entaylling of 38 of the kynges and queenys Beestes in freeston, baryng shyldes wyth the kynges armes and the queenys ; that is to say, foure dragones, scyx lyones, five grewhounds, five harttes, foure unicornes serving to stand about the ponddes in the pondyard at 26s. the piece, £\f^ : 8 : o. " Item for paynting of 30 stone bests standyng uppon bases abought the ponds in the pond yard — Payd to Heny Blankston of London, paynter, for paynting of 180 postes with white and greene in oyle and every poste conteyning 2 J yards deyppe at i6d. the yard standing in the kynge's new Garden, £'i,z : 6 : 8. " Also for lyke paynting 96 pouncheons with white and greene and in oyle wrought with fine antyke upon both sydes, berying up the rayles in the said garden, ^^4 : 16 : 10. Also for paynting 960 yards in length of rayle. "Kynges Beasts at the mount — Also payd Mych. of Hayles, kerver, for couttyng, makyng and karvyng of 16 1 We are indebted for these extracts to Mr. J. C. Robinson. Tliey are given in full in Mr. Law's History of Hampton Court Palace. n. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 27 of the kynges and the queenys beestes in tymber standyng about the mounte in the kynges new garden, the kynge finding stuff thereto at 20s. the pece, by convencyon, £,16 : o : o. "Dials — To Bryce Augustine of Westmynster cloke- maker for making 16 brazin dials serving for the kynge's new garden at 4s. 4d. the piece. " Trees — 200 young treys of oake and elme — appul trees and pere trees — 5 servys trees, 4 holly trees, quycksettes of woodbyne and thorne — treys of you — sypers, Genaper, and Bayes at zd. the pece, 600 chery trees at 6d. the 100 — 200 rose at 4d. the hundred, violettes, primroses, gitliver slips, mynts and other sweet flowers, sweet williams at 3d. the bushel — a bourder of rosemary 3 years old to set about the mount." The actual posts and rails mentioned above are perhaps shown in the view of Hampton Court garden, which forms part of the back- ground to the contemporary picture of Henry VIII. and his family at Hampton Court. ^ Some idea of the size can be formed from the 960 yards of railing. The only fragment of Henry VIII. 's garden at Hampton Court is probably the small sunk garden close to the vine-house called the Pond garden. Soon after 1539 the great Palace of Nonsuch, near Cheam, in Surrey, was begun for Henry VIII. It is certain that Italian workmen were largely 1 Mr. Law also refers to a drawing by Wynegaarde in the Bodleian Library, and there is a remarkable view of these gardens in Tudor times in a picture of Queen Elizabeth, which was shown at the Tudor Exhibition. No. 310 — The plots are shown divided by sanded paths with wooden balustrades and terminals at the angles, not unlike the views in the Hortus Floridus of Crispin de Pass — all the woodwork is painted red in the picture. 2 8 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. employed on this building, even if the design was not by an Italian ; and it is evident, from the description left by Hentzner, that Italian examples were freely copied in this garden.'' The kitchen garden and the fruit garden were separated, and *the latter was surrounded by a wall 14 feet high, covered with rosemary. Hentzner noticed this practice of covering the whole surface of a wall with rosemary at Hampton Court and other places in England. " In the artificial pleasure gardens," he writes, " there are many columns and pyramids of marble, and two fountains of springing water — one shaped like a round, the other like a pyramid ; little birds spouting forth water sit on them. In the grove of Diana, in which is an artificial fountain, very pleasant to look upon, Actason is being changed into a stag by the sprinkling of the goddess, with inscriptions underneath." Devices of this description, water- engines and elaborate hydraulic machines, were common in the great gardens of the sixteenth century. Hentzner mentions a curious sundial and fountain in the gardens at Whitehall which drenched the spectators if they came too close. Classical names and allusions were freely applied to the different parts of the garden. The garden at Theobald's, begun for Lord ' Hentzner was a German who travelled through England in the sixteenth century and published an account of his travels in Latin at Nuremburg in 1598. 30 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. Burleigh in 1560, contained at one end a small mound called " the Mount of Venus." Hentz- ner gives a detailed account of this garden. " Close to the palace is a garden surrounded on all sides by water, so that any one in a boat may wander to and fro among the fruit -groves with great pleasure to himself. There you will find various trees and herbs, labyrinths made with great pains, a fountain of springing water, of white marble ; columns, too, and pyramids placed about the garden ^ — some of wood, some of stone. We were afterwards taken to the garden-house by the gardener, and saw in the ground floor, whi.ch is circular in shape, twelve figures of Roman emperors in white marble, and a table of Lydian stone. The sides of the upper floor are surrounded by lead tanks, into which water is brought by pipes, so that fish can be kept in them, and in summer-time one can wash there in cold water. In a banqueting- room close to this room, and joined to it by a little bridge, there was an oval table of red marble." In an account written by Frederick, Duke of Wiirzburg, in 1592, this table is described as of black touchstone 14 spans long, 7 spans wide, and I span thick. Peck, in his Desiderata Curiosa, says of these gardens, " One might walk two myle in the walkes before he came to their ends." Gardens such as these were plainly inspired by Italian examples, and the Italian Renais- sance garden was a close copy of the description 11. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 31 left by the post -Augustan writers, and more particularly by Pliny the younger. Pliny's account of his Tuscan villa abounds in architect- ural details, such as garden-houses adorned with marble and painting, fish-ponds and fountains in marble, and marble seats ; and Pliny, in describ- ing the general lie of his house and grounds, uses the words amoenitas tectorum — a phrase curiously suggestive of the sweet, low lines of an Elizabethan manor-house. Clipped work, chiefly in box, is often mentioned in this account. The xystus, a space in front of the garden portico, was spaced out with box-trees, cut to various shapes, while the ground between was covered with figures of animals, set out flat on the ground, in clipped box. The paths were marked out with box edgings, and in the inter- vening plots appeared the names of master or workmen and other devices grown in box, or obelisks, or apple-trees.^ The resemblance be- tween these details and a sixteenth - century garden is close, and it is to this source that we should look for the origin of shaped or cut work. The topiarius, or pleacher, was a very important person in the Roman garden, and the practice of cutting trees into various shapes was revived by the Italians of the fifteenth century. The beautifiil woodcuts to the Hyfneroto- ^ " viae plures intercedentibus buxis dividuntur, alibi pratulum, alibi ipsa buxus intervenit, in formas milie descripta, literis interdum, quae modo nomen domini dicunt, modo artiiicis, alternis metulae surgunt alternis inserta sunt poma." — Efistolae, v. 6. 32 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. machia Poliphili (Aldus, 1499) show several designs of cut work. Poliphilus dreams that he and Pollia are conducted over the island of Cythera ; and some curious illustrations are given of the clipped box-trees In the enchanted garden. An English version of this book appeared in England in 1592 ; but by this time the habit of cutting box and yew and juniper into different shapes was well established in England. Bacon refers to it in his well-known Essay on Gardens, and the intricate hedge which was to surround his main garden implies clip- ping on a most elaborate scale. There is a curious contemporary account of the garden of Kenilworth in a letter from one of the officers of the Court to Master Humphry Martin, mercer, of London. This letter was written from Kenilworth in 1575, during Elizabeth's visit to the castle. In front of the castle was a terrace walk raised 10 feet above the garden, and 1 2 feet wide ; at either end were arbours, " redolent by sweet trees and flowers," and along the balustrade, on the garden side, obelisks, spheres, and coats of arms In stone were set out at equal distances. Below this terrace was the garden, an acre or more in extent, divided into four quarters by fine sanded walks. In the centre of each plot rose an obelisk of red porphyry with a ball at the top. The garden was planted with apple-trees, pears, and cherries. In the middle of the wall n. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 33 opposite the terrace was a great aviary 30 feet long, 14 broad, and 20 high; and in the centre of the garden a fountain of white marble rose out of an octagonal basin, " wherein pleasantly playing to and fro (were) carp, tench, bream, and for varietee pearch and eel — a garden then so appointed, as whearin aloft upon sweet shadowed walks of terras, in heat of soomer, to feel the pleasaunt whisking wynde above, or delectable coolness of the fountain spring beneath, to taste of delicious strawberries, cherris, and other fruites even from their stalks." ^ Bacon's garden, which should be taken in immediate connection with the palace of the preceding essay, was to be divided into three parts — a green, with a straight path across the centre, and covered walks at the sides; then came the main garden, surrounded by an open arcade, with carpenter's work, with an " entire hedge of some 4 feet high above it," ornamented with little turrets and figures. In the centre of this garden was to be a mound, 30 feet high, and there was to be a banqueting - house, and fountains and tanks " finely paved," surrounded with images, and " embellished with coloured glasse and such things of lustre." Beyond this was to be " the heath " or wilderness, as it was afterwards called, a thicket of sweet-briar and honeysuckle, " and the ground set with violets, 1 We are indebted to Mr. A. A. Gibson for this reference. Further details of this garden will be found under " Fountains and Aviaries." D 34- THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND n. strawberries, primroses, and the like low flowers, being withal sweet and sightly." The EngHsh garden became in the sixteenth century a much more important affair in every way than it ever had been before ; much money was spent on it, and great care given to its design. Bacon talks of 30 acres of ground as the mini- mum for a prince's garden. But, apart from this matter of size and elaboration, the only specific importations from Italy appear to have been the use of terraces and balustrades and great flights of stairs, and the free use of statuary ; a habit of mythological allusion in various parts of the garden ; and the practice of clipping trees into various shapes, and distributing them symmetrically. The alleys, green walks, and covered walks, the " deambulationes ligneae horti," the arbours, the knots or figures, labyrinths and mazes, the conduits, tanks, and fountains, and particularly, the enclosing walls and definite boundary lines, were only the development of features which had existed already in the mediaeval garden. Some of the more extravagant fancies which were caught up in England in the first flush of the Renaissance were abandoned in the following century. One doubts if any " little Figures with broad plates of round coloured glasse gilt for the sunne to play upon," perched on the top of a high hedge, were ever used in the seventeenth century. Caprices of this sort obtained no permanent 11. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 35 hold in England — the national tradition was too sober to accept them — for in Bacon's own words they were " nothing to the true pleasure of a garden." And, again, it must be remembered that Bacon's essay can- no more be taken as an accurate picture of the average garden of his time than his Essay on Building as a representa- tion of an ordinary Elizabethan house. Both essays are ideal sketches, and Bacon's treatment is purely literary ; with all its wealth of detail it is exceedingly difficult to work out any possible plan to fit the description given. The gardens at Moor Park, told of by Sir William Temple, were said to have been laid out on the lines of this essay — ^ probably the designer was not careful to inform his client how much was due to Bacon, and how much to the designer — for when all is said. Bacon's ideas of design were those of the amateur. His most elaborate treatise, the Sylva Sylvarum, deals with experi- ments and observations in horticulture, treated as one application of his system of philosophy ; but the book has no relation to garden design at all. Bacon was not the first in the field with his Essay on Gardens. Borde and Thomas Hill had both dealt with the subject many years earlier. Dr. Andrew Borde was an eccentric person of good education and abilities who was born in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and died in the Fleet in 1549. In the second chapter of 36 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. a curious little book entitled the Boke for to lerne a man to he wyse in buyldyng of his house for the health of his body, e to holde quyetnes for the helth of his soule and body, etc., Borde discusses the question of "aspecte" and " pros- pecte." " My con-ceyte," he says, " is such, that I had rather not to buylde a mansyon or a house than to buylde one without a good prospect i to .it i from it." The chief prospect is to be east, especially north-east, for the " est wynde is tem- perat, fryske, and fragrant." This remarkable character of the east wind is repeated by Hill, and was, as Markham pointed out, the result of borrowing wholesale from Italian writers, without either acknowledging the source or correcting their statements by local experience. " Furthermore," says Borde, " it is a commodious and a pleasant thing in a mansyon to have an orcharde of sundrye fruytes, but it is more comodyous to have a fayre garden repleatyd with herbes of aromatyke and redolent savoures ; in the garden may be a poole or two for fysshe, yf the pooles be clene kept, also a park re- pleatyd with dere and conys is a necessary and a pleasant thynge " ; and the country gentle- man's residence is not complete without a "dove-cote, a payre of buttes for archery, and a bowling alley." Thomas Hill was a volu- minous writer who drew his materials mainly from Latin authors. In 1563 he published A most brief e and pleasaunt treaty se teachynge n. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 37 how to dress, sowe, and set a garden, gathered out of the principallest authors in this art. Hill refers to Pliny and Columella, and deals with aspect, with the choice of site, the qualities of the ground, fencing and enclosures ; and to these are added some notes on the properties of plants and herbs, maxims as to the times and seasons to be observed in planting, and remarks on the signs of the zodiac. The book is a small octavo, printed in black letter, and Hill states that the " lyke, hitherto, hath not been published in the Englishe tungue." The first edition is lost. In 1568 he published a third edition under the title of The profitable^ Arte of Gardening, with additions, treatises on bees, and " yeerly conjectures meet for husbandmen to know." Five subsequent editions of this book were published in the years 1574, 1579, 1586, 1593, 1608. Two woodcuts of designs for mazes are given — one circular in a square, the other square ; these were to be formed, "with Issop and Thyme or Lavender Cotton spike masserome " ; in each angle of the square was to be planted a fine fruit-tree, and " in the myddle of it a proper herber decked with Roses or else some fayre tree of Rosemary or other Fruite." The third edition also contains five knots for thyme or hyssop. In 1577 a new book appeared, entitled The Gardener' s Labyrinth, containing " a discourse of the gardener's life, etc., wherein are set forth divers 38 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. Herbers, knots, and mazes, cunningly handled for the beautifying of gardens, etc., gathered out of the best approved writers of Garden- ing, Husbandrie, and Physicke, by Didymus Mountaine." It appears, from the dedication to Lord Burghley, that this book was edited by Fig. 5. — From The Gardener ^ Labyrinth. Henry Dethicke after the death of Mountaine. The book is nothing more than an enlarged edition of Thomas Hill's Profitable Art. Much of the text and several of the woodcuts are reproduced exactly, and it would seem almost certain that " Didymus Mountaine " is no other than Thomas Hill, and that Master Dethicke yielded to the temptation to exploit 40 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND n. materials collected by another man. Dethicke or " lyioutitaine " leads ofF with a graji^Jist of twenty - eight authors, in which " Vergile " appears between Palladius Rutilius and Didymus, and Hesiod stands next to Africanus. The first part deals with the garden, the second with the distillation of herbs. Some suggestions are given for the formation of arbours and labyrinths and the spacing of beds and alleys, but the greater part of the book is taken up with advice as to planting, and quotations from authors, such as " the skilful Rutilius," "the learned Democritus," "the worthie Pliny," and "the well-practised Apuleius." Generally speaking, the writer conceived of a garden as a small enclosed space, with a broad walk inside the wall on all four sides of a rectangular plot ; and the latter was to be subdivided into a number of smaller plots divided by narrow alleys. The maze, or the labyrinth, or any of the various knots, would occupy one of the smaller plots. The book is written m a tedious style, and with much repetition. Alts value consists in the light which it throws on the average English garden of the sixteenth century, as contrasted with the princely g,arden^ sketched by Bacon. A further point of interest in the book is its curious superstition. The gardener is carefully to observe the moon and the aspect of the planets before he sows. Thus " the moone increasing and running between the 28 degree of Taurus II. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 41 and the xi degree of the signe Gemini, sow fine seedes, and plant daintie herbes ; but the moone found between the 28th degree of Gemini and the exit of Cancer (although she increase) yet bestow no daintie seeds in your earth." As a protection against hail, Mountaine suggests a device of Philostratus. You drag a " Marsh tortoise " round the garden on its back, and then place it still on its back on a little mound, carefully banking it up, so that the tortoise cannot tumble over or do anything but flap its legs. This is supposed to frighten away the hail. Thomas Hill mentions that a " speckled toad, enclosed in an earthen pot " was considered another good remedy. Hill, like Bacon, was not a designer, or even a practical fruit-grower. Bacon wrote as a literary man, and Hill as a compiler of manuals. Tpi&:-4rst attempt to deal, with the laying out o£-ga-rdens in the light of actual experience was made by Gervase Markham, who set himself to write a complete account of the knowledge and accomplishments which became the country gentleman. Markham is English of the English, and the most delightful of writers. He had an amazing contempt for his pre- decessors, who, in writing on gardens, had contented themselves with quoting from Latin and Italian writers, " whence it comes that our Englishe book knowledge in these cases is both disgraced and condemned, every one fayling in 42 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. his experiments, because he is guided by no home-bred but a stranger, as if to read the Englishe tongue there were none better than an Italian pedant" {The English Husbandman). " Contrary to all other authors, I am neither beholding to Pliny, Virgil, Columella, etc. . . . according to the plaine true Englishe fashion, thus I pursue my purpose." As a matter of fact, his first treatise, The Country Farm, 1615, consisted mainly of translations from the French of Olivier de Serres. In regard to general arrangement of house and grounds, Markham gives a plan evidently based on the yeoman's house, such as is found in the Weald of Kent. The house was to be placed north and south. In front there was to be a small fore court enclosed with a fence, which might be replaced by a gate -house or terrace ; at the back of the house was the base court, with a " faire large pond well stoned and gravelled in the bottom," in the centre. On the north side of the base court were the stables, cow-houses, and swine-cotes ; on the south side, the barns and poultry-houses ; on the west side, joining these two arms, the lodges, with cart-shed under. The garden was to be on the south side of the house. Markham gives separate rules for the garden and the orchard, but they were practically laid out on the same lines. He further separates the kitchen garden from the garden of pleasure, and subdivides the latter into two parts: (i) H. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 43 The nosegay garden, to be planted with violets, gillyflowers, marigolds, lilies and daffodils, and " such strange flowers as hyacinths, dulippos, narcissus, and the like " ; (2) the garden of herbs, set with southern-wood, rosemary, hyssop, lavender, basil, rue, tansy, all-good, marierome, pennyroyal, and mint. The garden, like the orchard, might either be laid out as a single square, subdivided by cross paths into four quarters, or as a series of squares, two, or three, or more, on different levels. In the latter case each square was to be raised 8 feet or so (he also says seven or eight steps) above the lower level, and to be reached by " convenient staires of state " ; over this ascent " there might be built some curious and artificiall banqueting- house." A broad path would run round each square, with paths of the same width forming the four quarters, and in the centre might be placed " either a conduit of some anticke fashion, a standard of some unusuall devise, or else some Dyall or other Pyramid thet may grace and beautifie the garden." Both garden and orchard were to be surrounded with a stone or brick wall, if possible, or failing that, " a high strong pale, or a great ditch with quick- set hedge." All the quarters to the squares should be planted differently, and a series of knots or interlacing figures are given, which were to be planted with germander, hyssop, thyme, pink gillyflowers, or thrift, with borders n. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 45 of lavender, rosemary, or box./^The noticeable point in Markham's account of the gardens is the emphasis with which he insists on the necessity of ordered design, not only for all kinds of gardens, but for the orchards and fish- ponds as well. Everything is to be laid out in comely order. The kitchen garden is not to be a dreary wilderness of vegetables, but should have its broad trim paths, its borders of lavender or roses, its well or fountain, and even its arbours or " turrets of lattice fashion," as in the garden of pleasure. ^One finds no sugges- tion in Markham of " improving nature " ; the point would never have occurred to him whether nature was to be improved or dis- improved ; but, on the other hand, one does find in him a genuine love of nature herself, of the music of birds, of the sweet scent of flowers and all their dainty colouring. His influence through the seventeenth century was con- siderable ; several of his treatises were published in a collected form under the title oi AWay_ ^to_^get.Jl^£alth, and this book went through fifteen editions, the last appearing as late as 1695, when the school of Le Notre was well in the ascendant. William T.awso n was a friend of Markham's, and wrote, like the latter, out of his own experience. In 1618 he published A New Orchard and Garden, being, as he says in the title-page, "the labours of forty-eight years. 46 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. more particularly in Yorkshire." Lawson seems to have lived in Holdernesse. An orchard vsrith Lawson meant, in the strictest sense, an apple garden, for it was to be laid out with ;? large walks, broad and long, having seats of j^camomilei and enclosed with walls or moats, and to have borders and beds of sweet flowers, and cut work in " lesser wood," mazes, and bowling alleys, and a pair of butts ; and " one chief grace that adornes an orchard, I cannot let slippe ; a brood of nightingales, who with their several notes and tunes, with a strong delight- some voyce out of a weake body, will bear you company night and day . . . the gentle robbin red-breast will helpe her, . . . neither will the silly wren be behind in Summer, with her dis- tinct whistle (like a sweet Recorder) to cheere your spirits." LawsoaJays-it-down-as a matter- of course that a garden should be square, and gives some designs for knots for the square beds in The Countrie Housewife s Garden, 1617. The kitchen garden and flower garden should be divided, but you are not to neglect beauty in the kitchen garden, and you may therefore make " comely borders to the beds, with Roses, Lavender, and the like." The most delightful chapter in The New Orchard is that which deals with the ornaments of the garden. The words seem instinct with the sweetness and simplicity of the old-world garden. Lawson is a writer for whom one forms a personal Fig. 8. — From Lawson's New Orchard. A. All these squares must be set with trees; the gardens and other ornaments must stand in spaces betwixt the trees and in the borders and fences. B. Trees 20 yards asunder. C. Garden knot. D. Kitchen garden. | E. Bridge. F. Conduit. \ G. Staires. H. Walkes set with great wood thicke. I. Walkes set with great wood round about your orchard. K. The out-fence. L. The out-fence set with stone fruit. M. Mount. To force earth for a mount or such like, set it round with quick and lay boughs of trees strangely intermingled, tops inward, with the earth in the middle. N. Still-house. O. Good standing for bees if you have an house. P. If the river run by your doore and under your mount it will be pleasant. 48 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ii. affection. He is less precise and business-like than Bacon, who wrote of these things as an accomplished man of the world ; Lawson is altogether more sincere and unworldly, his humour is gentler, his style more gracious and musical, and he wrote with a sense of what is beautiful in nature which could only come from long musings among the flowers and many a leisurely hour in the trim alleys of his garden. Of a sense so delicate as this, Bacon was incap- able. " What can your eye desire to see, your eare to heare, your mouth to taste, or your nose to smell that is not to be had in an orchard with abundance and beauty.'' What more delightsome than an infinite varietie of sweet smelling flowers.? decking with sundrye colours the greene mantle of the earth, the universal mother of us all, so by them bespotted, so dyed, that all the world cannot sample them, and wherein it is more fit to admire the Dyer than imitate his workmanship, colouring not only the earth but decking the ayre, and sweetening every breath and spirit. " The rose red, damaske, velvet, and double double province rose, the sweet muske rose double and single, the double and single white rose, the faire and sweet scenting woodbind double and single ; Purple cowslips and double cowslips, primrose double and single, the violet nothing behind the best for smelling sweetly, and a thousand more will provoke your con- n. THE GARDEN IN ENGLAND 49 tente, and all these by the skill of your Gardener so comely and orderly placed in your Borders and squares." Lawson's work is typical of the most charm- ing side of the Renaissance in England, of its delight in flowers and birds, and all rare and beautiful things in art and nature ; but Bacon's weight of intellect bore down this subtle delicate instinct, and the treatises on this subject for the next fifty years follow the lines of The Sylva Sylvarum rather than The New Orchard and Garden. CHAPTER III THE FORMAL GARDEN— Continued It has been usual in dealing with gardens to include some account of the numerous Herbals which were published in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Strictly speaking, these lie outside the scope of our sub- ject ; the Herbals are little more than catalogues raisonnees of the various fruits and flowers grown in England at the time, with notes on their medicinal qualities, and instructions as to the proper times and methods of planting. This has nothing to do with garden design. As, however, the distinction between garden design, horticulture, and botany was never very clearly made, we .give the dates of the principal Herbals. Mr. Hazlitt gives a complete list of the bibliography of gardening, but, as will appear from the titles of the works there mentioned, for the next fifty years after Lawson's book, nearly all the treatises which are not Herbals in. THE FORMAL GARDEN 51 deal with horticulture. The Great Herbal, from the French, was first published in 1516 ; The Little Herbal, from the Latin, in 1525. Gary's Book of the Properties of Herbs, and Macer's Herbal were published about 1 540 ; Ascham's Little Herbal, 1550 ; Turner's Herbal, 1551 to 1568 ; Lyte's translation of Dodoens's Herbal, 1578 ; John Gerard's Herbal m 1597 ; John Parkinson's well-known book, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, The Garden of Pleasure, was published in 1629. His Herbal on Theatre of Plants followed in 1 640. Gerard had a famous physic garden in Holborn, near Ely Place, overlooking the Fleet. This was one of the earliest of the botanical gardens which reached such a high pitch of perfection in the latter half of the seventeenth century, as, for instance, the well-known Botanical Garden at Oxford which was founded and presented to the University by the Earl of Danby in 1632. A botanical garden and museum was kept in South Lambeth by John Tradescant. Isaac Walton gives some particulars of the Tradescants. The grandfather and father were gardeners to Queen Elizabeth, the son to Charles L The father and son travelled over Europe and ithe East in search of plants, and the son is said to have travelled in Virginia for the same purpose. His Catalogue was not published till 1662. The collection formed by the Tradescants was purchased by Mr. Ashmole, who gave it to 52 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND ni. the University of Oxford, and it thus became the basis of the Ashmolean collection. In lists of garden books of this period the name of Sir Hugh Piatt often occurs, and the titles of his books, The Garden of Eden and Florae's Paradise raise expectations which are uniformly disappointed. Piatt says he will not trouble his readers with rules for the shaping and fashioning of an orchard ^ — "every Drawer or embroiderer, nay, almost each Dancing-master, may pretend to such niceties," and having thus demolished the necessity of such a poor thing as the designer, Piatt unfolds his own learning in a meagre string of amateur notes on plants. Piatt was only a dabbler in science, and from our point of view stands on a very different footing to such men as Markham and Lawson. Both of the latter were thoroughly familiar with the garden, not only as practical gardeners, but as designers of gardens. They do not appear to have had any special training in design, but there is an important difference between the country gentleman of the seventeenth century and his successor in the nineteenth. The latter has no traditional knowledge of design, and the arts of design form no part whatever of his education, whereas the English gentleman from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century did possess a general traditional knowledge of design and of the principles which govern it. He was not better educated, but he succeeded III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 53 to an excellent way of doing things as the result of many generations of experience and spontaneous development, instead of having to choose between half a dozen different ways, with all of which he is equally unfamiliar. It was thus that, in the seventeenth century, the country gentleman might be able to lay out his own garden, because, with trifling variations, he laid it out on the same lines as his father and his grandfather before him. In more important work, however, there seems little doubt that the architect, or rather the architect builder, as he usually was, designed the grounds as well as the house, and this continued to be the custom till the days of Capability Brown. Du CerceaUj in the plates of his Les Plus ExceUfnts Bastiments, gives quite as much attention to the gardens as to the palaces ; and in all books of illustration throughout the seventeenth century house and grounds are shown as a whole. There is a small plan of a house and garden by John Thorpe in the Soane Museum, which shows a sc^arehouse, with courts in back and front, and garden at the side, divided into four main plots, subdivided into smaller knots and squares. On the back court is written a note " nothing out ofsquai^" John Thorpe died early in the ^seventeenth century. The distinction of all these earlier seventeenth-century garden plans is the extreme simplicity of their arrange- 54 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iii. ment. However rich the details, there is no difficulty in grasping the principle of a garden laid out in an equal number of rectangular plots. Everything is straightfor- ward and logical ; you are not bored with hopeless attempts to master the bearings of the garden. The old gardens at Wilton, designed by Isaac'^'He'Caux, were laid out in three divisions, each divided into two by a broad path running down the centre, with cross paths running to the outer walks. Isaac de Caux, or Caus, was a German architect, resident in England in the early part of the seventeenth century, and in the employment of the Court. He laid out the gardens at Wilton for the Earl of Pembroke, and published a series of twenty -six copper plates to illustrate these gardens in detail, with the following descrip- tion : — " This Garden, within the enclosiire of the new wall is a thowsand foote long and about Foure hundred in breadthe divided in its length into three long squares or parallelograms, the first of which divisions next the build- ing, heth fFoure Platts, embroydered ; in the midst of which are ffoure fountaynes with statues of marble in their midle, and on the sides of those Platts are the Platts of fflowers, and beyond them is the little Terrass rased for the more advantage of beholding those Platts, this for the first division. In the second are two Groves or woods all with divers walkes, and through those Groves passeth the river Nader having of breadth in this place 44 foote upon which is built the bridge of the breadth of the greate walke. In the midst of the aforesayd Groves are two great statues of 56 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. white marble, of eight ffoote high, the one of Bacchus and the other Flora, and on the sides ranging with the Platts of fflowers are two covered Arbors of 300 ffoote long and diverse allies. Att the beginning of thee third and last division, are on either side of the great walke, two Ponds with Fountaynes and two Collumnes in the midle, casting water all their height which causeth the moveing and turning of two crownes att the top of the same and beyond is a Compartment of greene with diverse walkes planted with Cherrie trees and in the midle is the Great oval with the Gladiator of brass ; the most famous Statue of all that antiquity hath left. On the sydes of this compartiment and answering the Platts of flowers and long arbours are three arbours of either side with twining Galleryes communicating themselves one into another. Att the end of the greate walke is a Portico of stone cutt and adorned with Pilasters and Nyches within which are 4 fiigures of white marble of 5 ffoote high. Of either side of the sayd portico is an assent leading up to the terrasse upon the steps whereof instead of Ballasters are sea monsters casting water from one and the other from the top to the bottome, and above the sayd portico is a great reserve of water for the grotto." De Caux was superseded, both at Court and in the employment of the Earl of Pembroke, by Inigo Jones, who designed the famous Palladian bridge which replaced the bridge mentioned above. James I. had a French gardener in his employment named Andre Mollet, who came of a family of famous garden designers. His father was said to have invented the jardin brode, and wrote a book entitled Le Theatre des Plantes et Jardinages, for which Andre Mollet supplied designs. These and other designs by Mollet were published at III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 57 Stockholm in 165 1, as Le Jar din de Plaisir, contintant flusieurs dessins de jardinage, tant ■parterres en Broderie, compartiments de gazon, que Bosquets et autres. On the title-page of this book Mollet is described as " Maistre des Jardins de la serenissime Reine de Suede." The period from the outbreak of the Civil War to the Restoration is, comparatively speak- ing, a blank in the history of the arts. Evelyn records the destruction of part of the gardens at Nonsuch by the Puritans ; writing in 1666, he says : " There stand in the garden two handsome stone pyramids, and the avenue planted with rowes of faire elmes ; but the rest of these goodly trees both of this and Worcester Park adjoyning, were felled by those destructive & avaricious rebels in the late war, which defaced one of the stateliest seats his Majesty had." No one did more than Evelyn to encourage the study of horticulture itTEi^and ; he wrote treatises and translations^ himself, and induced Worlidge and others to write on the subject ; but though fully alive to the beauty of a well-designed garden, he paid less attention to the question of garden design, foreseeing, perhaps, the chaos which was to follow the inter- ference of the man of letters in the eighteenth century. It seems that Evelyn did contemplate a ^ The English Vineyard, 1663; Syl'va, 1664.} Kalendarium Hortense, l656; The French Gardiner, translated by J. E., 1672; Of Gardens, by Rapin, translated by J. E., 1673 j The Compkat Gardener, De la (^"intinye, translated 1693; Directions concerning Melons, 1693. 58 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. book on garden design, under the title of ^lysi uML. Brittanicum. This work would have been a most exhaustive treatise. It was to have con- sisted of three books — the first dealing with the soil of the garden and the seasons, the second with garden design under twenty-one heads, the third with the jneans of producing rare species, distilling, and various miscellaneous points. We give in an appendix a complete list of the subdivisions. Unfortunately Evelyn never carried out his intention ; but the titles left by him are important, as showing how Evelyn conceived of a garden, and the clear distinction which existed in his mind between garden design and horticulture. With the Restoration a change came over the designs of the larger English gardens. Charles II. was in intimate relations with the brilliant Court of Louis XIV., at a time when the latter was in the full swing of his magnificence, and when architects such as Mansard and Perrault were seconded by a designer of such remarkable genius as Le Notre. The noble paths and terraces, the great avenues and masses of foliage, the broad expanse of grass and water in which Le Notre delighted, became the fashion in England. Whatever faults Le Notre may have had (and to the landscapist he represents all that is detestable), he was at least a man of large ideas and scholarly execution. He carried the art of III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 59 garden design to the highest point of develop- ment it has ever reached, and this by no violent reform or blundering originality, but by profound thought on the lines laid down by his predecessors. Something of the grandeur of Le Notre, some flavour of his lordly manner, spread to England, and for the next fifty years or so the grounds of the great noblemen's country-houses were laid out on a scale compared with which even Bacon's 30 acres seems a trifling affair ; for Le Notre had covered 200 acres with gardens at Versailles, and the great terrace which he built at St. Germain-en-Laye is i^ mile long and 115 feet wide. There is a story that Le Notre actually came to England to lay out the grounds of Greenwich and St. James's Parks ; but there appears to be no evidence of this. There is a plan of the palace and grounds of St. James's in Kip's book. The gardens covered the whole of the space now taken up by Marlborough House and Carlton House Terrace, and terminated in a grove laid out as a fatte- d'oie, or goose foot, on the site now occupied by the offices of the London County Council and other buildings. A straight canal bordered by double rows of trees extended from the Chelsea Gate to opposite the Tiltyard. The only vestige of the original laying out is the quadruple avenue which runs from Buckingham Palace to Spring Gardens. It is also doubtful 6o THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND in. whether Le Notre personally had anything to do with Hampton Court, but it is plain that the general arrangement of the grounds in front of Wren's Buildings was due to his influence, and it is known that the great Fountain Garden was first laid out for Charles II. The enormous semicircle, with the three radiating avenues and the great centre canal, the intricate parterres de broderie, shown in Kip's view, and above all, the masterly con- ception of the grounds as a whole and in strict relation to the architecture of the palace, were certainly inspired by the influence of Le Notre, if not actually due to his design. There is no mention or any indication of the use of avenues on this scale before the Restoration. Indeed, Worlidge, whose book was published in 1677, specifically says : " It was not long since our choicest avenues were first planted with those ornamental shades that now are become common." There is therefore good reason for assigning the origin of this feature to French influence. Individual avenues were, of course, in use before this date. Switzer says : "About the reign of Queen Elizabeth of immortal memory we may suppose some of the old avenues and walks adjoining noblemen's houses were planted." These, however, should be distinguished from the system of avenues radiating from one centre which was now introduced from France. III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 6i The landscape gardener of the following century, and his far less able followers in this, have had ideas of modifying a landscape by planting trees here and there or in clumps, or by throwing out woods, or by many more of their favourite devices for "chastening nature's graceful touch " ; but their ideas are altogether paltry when contrasted with the comprehensive scale on which designers went to work after the Restoration. Very few of these gigantic schemes remain intact, though there is a notable instance on the Boughton estate, near Kettering, where one suddenly finds one's self in the presence of avenues miles away from the house to which they relate. Part of the original laying out of the grounds of Wrest in Bedford- shire remains, and there are, of course, many instances of isolated avenues. Fortunately, however, four publishers — Mortier, Midwinter, Overton, aud Smith — took it into their heads to publish a series of elaborate double plates in folio, illustrating the great country seats of England at the end of the seventeenth century, under the title of Britannia Illustrata. The drawings for this series were made by a man named KnyfF,^ of whom little is known, and were engraved on copper by John Kip. The book was published in 1709, though many of 1 KnyiF was a painter of dogs and poultry who died in 1721 ; Jan Kip was born in Amsterdam in 1652. He came to England soon after the Restoration, and engraved views for Atkyns's Gloucester, Survey, and Badeslade's ^/ewj of Kent. He died in 1722. 62 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. the drawings were made much earlier, and is absolutely invaluable for a knowledge of the method of laying out gardens and grounds on a large scale at the end of the seventeenth century. Kip's book, Badeslade's Views of Kent (1722), and another book named Les Delices de la Grande Bretagne, are the loca das sic a 6i the subject. The park and gardens at Badminton are a typical instance. Kip gives three views of Badminton — our illustration is taken from the smaller print in Les Delices, 1727. The approach to the house was formed by a triple avenue, the centre avenue 200 feet wide, the two side avenues 80 feet wide. The entrance gates to this avenue were placed in the centre of a great semi- circular wall. The distance from this gate- way to the house was 2-|- miles. After passing through two more gateways the avenue opened on to a great oblong open space forming part of the deer park, with avenues on either side, and the entrance gate to the fore court of the house opposite the end of the main avenue. A broad gravelled path, with grass plots and fountains on either side, led from the entrance gate of the fore court to a flight of four steps leading to the pavement in front of the house. Kip's view shows a coach and six approaching the entrance gate, apparently not on the road but on the grass of the park. To the right hand was the base 64 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iii. court, with stables and outhouses ; at the back of the house the kitchen and fruit gardens and the pigeon-house. To the left of the house and fore court were the bowling-green and pleasure gardens, with the grove beyond. The latter was divided into four plots, with four- way paths and a circular space and fountain in the centre. Each of the plots was planted with close - growing trees laid out as mazes, and trimmed close and square for a height apparently of some 15 to 20 feet from the ground. Opposite the centre alley was a semicircular bay divided into quadrants, each quadrant with a basin and fountain and great square hedges trimmed to the same height as the rest of the grove. The whole of these immense gardens were walled in, with the exception of a fence round the grove. Wide gates were set at the ends of all the main paths, and from these, as points of departure, avenues were laid out in straight lines, radiating and intersecting each other in all directions. If Kip's figures are correct, some of these avenues, which extended beyond the park to the villages in the adjacent country, were 6 or 7 miles long. As shown on plans these avenues look bizarre and unattractive, but in actual fact — that is, when the trees are fully grown — their effect is very fine. And here, again, the straight- forwardness, or what one might call the hqnesty of the formal method is clearly shown. If a III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 65 landscape is to be altered, it may just as well be altered frankly ; and these designers, liking long lines of trees and the vistas of great avenues, planted their straight lines without any affectation that the work was nature's. At the same time this practice was, perhaps, the first sign of the coming decadence. It was a failure in that strictly logical system which sep arated the garde n—from- the p ar-k3 and lef t the latter to take care of itself — a system whic h frankly subordinated nature to art .within_the g arden wa ll, but in return gave nature an absolutely free hand out5ide_it. These avenues and rides were an attempt to manipulate the face of an entire countryside, and gave a point of departure to the futilities of Brown and the improvers of nature in the following century. Generally speaking, the i nflue nce of Le Notre and his school showed itself in the increased scale_of English gardens, and in greater elabora- tion_ of detail . The gardens of Melbourne Hall, in Derbyshire, are a perfect instance of the French manner in England on a moderate scale. These gardens were remodelled and considerably enlarged for Thomas Coke, after- wards vice -chamberlain to George I., from designs by Henry Wise between 1704 and 1 7 1 1 . The older garden appears to have con- sisted of a terrace, with two levels below it and red brick walls on either side. The lower LEAD VASE. : MELBOURNE : DERBYSHlf^: Fig. II. III. THE FORMAL GARDEN 67 wall was probably removed, and an extensive bosquet or grove planted, with a great water- piece and several smaller fountains. Long alleys with palisades of limes were formed, and an amphitheatre of limes, with vistas radiating in all directions from a superb lead urn in the centre. The ground is of irregular plan, but the difficulties are met by the design in a most masterly manner. Some alterations were made in the garden about fifty years ago. Otherwise the original design is substantially perfect, and is a very valuable instance of a garden laid out when the French influence was still dominant in England. This influence, however, was prac- tically limited to the grounds of men of large estate, and the gardens of the smaller gentry were laid out on a much less costly scale, and without any great departure from tradi- tional lines. The gardens of Doddington, in Lincolnshire, or Dunham Massie, in Cheshire, as presented by Kip, show little or no French influence ; and the small gardens shown in Logan's views of the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge might have been laid out by Gervase Markham or William Lawson him- self. The Oxford and Cambridge gardens most effectually meet the objection to the formal style that it requires great space. Unfortunately, the original design has been de- stroyed in all these gardens, but their main dimensions have not been altered, and Logan's 68 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. views give a very accurate idea of their general character.! Meanwhile, there was a vigorous revival in the literature of gardens. Little or nothing had been written on the laying out of gar- dens since the time of Markham and Lawson. In 1665 appeared Flora, Ceres, and Pomona, by John Rea, Gent. The greater part of this book is taken up with descriptions of flowers, plants, and fruit-trees, and hor- -From Lrtgan. ticultural notes. But the introduction to the first book contains some account of the proper ordering of a " garden of delight," — that is, of the Fruit garden and the Flower garden. Rea wrote his book in his old age, and after forty years' practice as a planter of gardens, and though he describes his work as a " Florilege " and an innovation on the old method of the Herbal, with a sly dig at Mr. Parkinson by the way, he was a thorough- going adherent of the old school of design. He speaks with some contempt of " gardens of the new model " laid out with good walks and ^ Logan's Oxonia Illustraia^ 1675 j Cafjtahrigia IllusWata. Fig. 12.- II. THE FORMAL GARDEN 69 grass plots, and fountains, grottoes, statues, etc., but destitute of flowers, probably referring to some bad applications of French ideas. Rea did Le Notre injustice in implying that his method made no use of flowers ; Madame de Sevigne, writing to her daughter in 1678, about Le Notre's work at Clagny, says, " Vous connaissez la maniere de Le Nostre . . . ce sont des allees ou Ton est a I'ombre, et pour cacher les caisses " (for the orange-trees) " il y a de deux cotes, des palissades, a hauteur d'appui, toutes fleuries de tuberoses, de roses, de jasmins, d'oeillets ; c'est assurement la plus belle, la plus surprenante et la plus enchantee nouveaute qui se puisse imaginer." The garden which Rea contemplated was, of course, walled in. He talks of 40 yards square as the proper size for a private gentleman's fruit garden, and half this size for his flower garden. The flower gardens were to be laid out in simple geometrical patterns, for which he gives sixteen excellent -designs which show no trace at all of French influence. In 1670 appeared The English \ Gardener, by Leonard Meager, the third part of which deals with " the ordering of the garden of pleasure, with variety of knots and wilder- ness work after the best fashion." He gives a few diagrams of knots and designs for quarters, but says very little to the purpose on garden design. /In 1697 Meager published another book entitled The New Art of Gardening, but 70 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. both his works are inferior in value to the Sy sterna Horticultures, or Art of Gardening, by J. W., Gent., published in 1677, "illustrated with sculptures representing the form of gardens according to the newest models." J. W. is John Worlidge. His work consists of three books, and describes the details of the garden with some minuteness. The shape of the garden, its general plan, its walls and fences, its walks and arbours, terraces, seats, pleasure- houses, fountains and water -works, statues, obelisks, and dials, are all successively de-alt with, and followed by a systematic treatise on the flowers and trees with which the gardens should be planted. Worlidge repeated Rea's complaint as to the banishment of flowers, and the excessive use of sculpture in gardens, but his garden was perfectly formal and did not depart from the traditional lines in any sense whatever. No serious change was introduced under William and Mary, except that the habit of clipping yew and box -trees was carried to an excess that made it an easy prey for the sarcasm of Pope in the following century. The Dutch were fond of queer little trifles, and used to cut their trees into every conceivable shape. Switzer says that " this fashion was brought over out of Holland by the Dutch gardeners, who used it to a fault, especially in England, where we abound in so good grass and gravel " ; but Switzer is inaccurate here, for the custom km^m^mm V.''l"!»'t::^^\\ (M'|;v,;;;,;;;;;;iu,v,m Ml igJ ^^S ^ ■■•Siia , ,7;„ KuiiiiSiJiiir^ mjU rJJlP Fig. 13. — A Garden, from J. Worlidge. 72 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND m. of " pleaching " was an old one in England. It now, however, developed into a positive mania for cocks and hens and other conceits in yew and box, and for little clipped trees spaced symmetrically along the sides of the walks, as they are shown in nearly all Kip's views, and particularly in the views of Wimple and Staunton Harold. In the latter there is a suggestion of a whole menagerie in clipped work along the sides of the great basin. Peter Collinson notes that "the gardens about London in 171 2 were remarkable for fine cut greens and dipt yews in the shape of birds, dogs, men, ships, etc." The curious cut work in the gardens of Levens Hall, in Westmoreland, is a well-known instance. This garden was planted early in the eighteenth century, and is evidently a deliberate copy of a Dutch model. The difference between the French influence and the Dutch is very well shown by the contrast between the gardens of Melbourne and Levens ; there is something a little childish about the latter. In the garden of Risley Hall, in Derbyshire, there is a charming instance of cut yew — two doves about 7 feet long billing each other form an archway in a yew hedge ; but the most remarkable instance still exists at Packwood, in Warwickshire, where the Sermon on the Mount is literally represented in clipped yew. At the entrance to the " mount," at the end of the garden, stand four tall yews 20 feet high for the four evangelists, 74 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iii. and six more on either side for the twelve apostles. At the top of the mount is an arbour formed in a great yew-tree called the " pinnacle of the temple," which was also supposed to represent Christ on the Mount overlooking the evangelists, apostles, and the multitude below ; at least, this account of it was given by the old gardener, who was pleaching the pinnacle of the temple. CHAPTER IV THE END OF THE FORMAL GARDEN AND THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL When William and Mary began their reign gardening was already the fashionable hobby. Charles II. had patronised it in his casual manner: he began the great semicircle at Hampton Court and the gardens and park of St. James ; and for fifty years we find a succession of famous gardeners. Rose, who had studied under Le Notre, was gardener to Charles II. ; London was pupil to Rose, and Switzer pupil or servant to London and Wise. The great nursery at Brompton, which, in the following century, was estimated to contain plants to the value of £2°'°^° ^^ ;£40)000, was founded by a company of these men — 76 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. London, gardener to Compton, Bishop of Lon- don, Cook to the Earl of Essex, Lucre to the Queen Dowager at Somerset House, Field to the Earl of Bedford. According to Switzer, this firm laid out the gardens at Longleat, each of the partners staying there one month in turn. Lucre and Field died, and London bought out Cook, and shortly afterwards took Wise into partnership. George London and Henry Wise were the two most celebrated English gardeners of their time. London was "superintendent of their Majesties' gardens " at ;f 200 a year, and a page of the backstairs to Queen Mary. Be- sides the royal gardens, the firm directed most of the great gardens of England. Hampton Court, Kensington Gardens, Blenheim, Wan- stead, in Essex, Edger, in Herts, and Melbourne, in Derbyshire, were among their principal works. London seems to have fallen out of favour with Queen Anne. Switzer says, " Queen Anne (of pious memory) committed the care of her gar- dens in chief to Mr. Wise, Mr. London still pursuing his business in the country." London used to divide his business into circuits, spend- ing six weeks on his northern circuit, and riding 50 to 60 miles a day ; and it appears from a flaming advertisement, published by Evelyn at the beginning of his translation of De la Quintinye, that London and Wise undertook garden design of all sorts, as well as horticulture. Switzer, probably from jealousy, speaks in rather 78 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. disparaging terms of London's power as a designer. Both London and Wise seem to have been taken by the Dutch manner, though London, at anyrate, had seen the great French gardens, and in his design for the gardens of Melbourne, 1 704, he was much more influenced by French than by Dutch examples. In 1706 London and Wise published The Retired Gard'ner, a translation from Le Jardinier Solitaire, and a treatise of the Sieur Louis Liger of Auxerre, with ^Vj^'^^lp^l 1 ^SCAHEOWWOFBEILS &TEATHETR3g corrections by the trans- lators. The only sub- stantial addition which London and Wise made to this book was a I'ig- 16.— From London and Wise. description of the garden laid out by them for Marshall Tallard ^ at Nottingham. London died in 1 713. He lived just long enough to see all the boxwork at Hampton Court, which he had planted for William, pulled up by Queen Anne. Another translation from the French appeared in 1712, entitled The Theory and Practice of Gardening, done from the French Original, by John James of Greenwich. It is not known who wrote the original. It has been attributed both to D'Argenville Dezalliers and to Le Blond, pupils of Le Notre. Le Blond seems the more probable author. James does not appear ^ See Appendix II. IV. THE FORMAL GARDEN 79 to have known anything about its authorship, for the original was published anonymously in 1 709 ; but he inclined to think that it was written by an architect. The translation was published by subscription of the principal nobility and gentry of the time. It is illustrated with excellent engravings of the various parts of the formal garden, and contains by far the most valuable account ever published of the system of garden design as practised by the school of Le Notre. That system was now so completely matured that it was capable of being reduced to rules of practice, with the necessary conse- quence that its break-up was imminent. In 17 1 8 appeared Ichnographia Rustica, or the Nobleman's, Gentleman's, and Gardener's Re- creations, by Stephen Switzer, gardener. The writer of this book evidently supposed that he was developing the traditions of formal gar- dening ; but he had, in fact, lost touch of its essential principle — the principle that the garden within its enclosure is one thirjg, and the landscape outside it another, and that no attempt should be made to confuse the two. He devised a system of what he called " rural and extensive gardening," by which a garden of 20 acres should look to be 200 or 300. Walls and fences were to be removed, and woods and even cornfields made to appear part of the garden scheme. He urged that " those large sums of money that have been 8o THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. buried within the narrow limits of a high wall upon the trifling and diminutive beauties of greens and flowers (should be) lightly spread over great and extensive parks and forests." The designs which he furnishes are very intri- cate and tedious. He points out that his system " cashiers those interlacings of boxwork and such-like trifling ornaments " (and appar- ently flowers as well), and there is some ugly cant about " natural and polite gardening," which is ominous of what was to follow. Indeed, the change was now fairly on. the way. Like Switzer, Bridgeman, another well-known gardener of the time who succeeded Wise as gardener to George I., abandoned " verdant sculpture," as Horace Walpole calls it, though he still trimmed his hedgerows. The abuse and perversion of the good old custom of pleaching was a sign of decay. Garden design had reached the full development of which it was capable by the end of the seventeenth century ; it was growing stereotyped ; it became familiar, though incomprehensible, to the niran of letters and the amateur, and the latter at once set to work to pull it to pieces. It now became the fashion to rave about nature, and to condemn the straightforward work of the formal school as so much brutal sacrilege. Pope and Addison led the way, with about as much love of nature as the elegant Abbe Delille some three generations later. IV. THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 8i Addison began the attack in The Spectator,^ with the following extraordinary argument : — We may assume, he says, that works of nature rise in value according to the degree of their resem- blance to works of art. Therefore works of art rise in value according to the degree of their resemblance to nature. Gardens are works of art. Therefore they rise in value according to the degree of their resemblance to nature. Therefore in laying out a garden we are to copy nature as much as possible. This is a concise statement of the whole fallacy of the landscape gardener. In this curious argument the first half of the major premiss begs the question ; we do not value nature by the standard of art ; but even if this was true, the deduction from it of the second proposition is an inference from what is true under conditions to what is true absolutely, and the entire argument based on this amounts to a fallacy of the ambiguous middle, for the term " work of art " is used here both for " works of art " in the ordinary sense and for work which is artificial, that is made by man as distinct from nature. Pope, the most arti- ficial of writers, followed suit in The Guardian '^ with a witty catalogue of objects cut in yew- trees, supposed to be for sale, which included "a St. George in box, his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stab ^ The Spectator, No. 414, 25th June 1712. " The Guardian, No. 173, 1712. G 82 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. the Dragon by next April," and " a quickset bog shot up into a porcupine through being forgot a week in rainy weather." This was an excellent sarcasm on an admitted extra- vagance, and the formal school had undoubtedly run riot with their pleaching and statuary ; but this was not so much due to the system as to the fact that garden design had slipped out of the hands of cultivated designers and been monopolised by the nursery gardener. The latter, as Addison pointed out, would naturally destroy an old orchard, or anything else, how- ever beautiful, in order to reduce his stock of evergreens and plants. The " natural " manner of gardening now became the rage. Pope turned his 5 acres at Twickenham into a compendium of nature, and was considered to have shown admirable taste by condensing samples of every kind of scenery into a suburban villa garden. Even the architects were not true to their colours. Batty Langley published a sumptuous book on The New Principles of Gardening, the value of which consists chiefly in its paper and binding ; but Kent, who really was an architect of ability, was the great rene- gade. It seems almost inconceivable that a man like Kent, who could design fine and severe architecture, should have lent himself so abjectly to the fancies of the fashionable amateur. No doubt he had to make his living, and the fashion was too strong for him. Kent was something IV. THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 83 oi a painter as well as an architect, and he set to work with both hands, as it were, on garden design ; for while with his T-square and com- passes he would design indifferently Grecian temples, Anglo-Saxon ruins, or Gothic churches for the grounds, he proceeded to form landscape compositions on the most heroic scale that surely has ever entered the head of any painter, for the solid earth was to be his canvas, and the trees water and rocks his paints. With these mate- rials he endeavoured to the best of his ability to reproduce the landscapes of Claude and Poussin ; but he signally failed of his purpose, for instead of the classical breadth and repose of those great masters, the whole result was fussiness. As Sir William Chambers said : " Our virtuosi have scarcely left an acre of shade, or three trees growing in a line, from the Land's End to the Tweed." Chambers himself published his Dis- sertation on Oriental Gardens in 1773. This led, however, to little result beyond the use of light trellis work for verandahs and the backs of garden seats. This is how Walpole, most elegant of gushers, describes Kent's work : " Selecting favourite objects, and veiling de- formities by screens of plantations, he realised the composition of the greatest masters in painting. The living landscape was chastened and polished, not transformed." The chastening of nature was rather severe, for we find that it consisted in wholesale destruction of trees, alteration of 84 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. ground, building up of rocks, and, for a crown- ing effort of genius, in planting dead trees " to heighten the allusion to natural woods." He might as well have nailed stuffed nightingales to the boughs. As Scott said of him: " His style is not simplicity, but affectation labouring to seem simple." Kent's great work in gardens was Stowe in Buckinghamshire. These gardens were begun by Bridgeman with some approach to style, but Kent obliterated every trace of it. He so contrived his views and prospects that at every turn appeared a fresh tour de force. After inspecting the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian Pyramid, and St. Augustine's Cave, built of roots and moss, and adorned with indecent inscriptions, the amazed spectator would proceed to the Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, Dido's Cave, the Witch House, the Temple of Ancient and Modern Virtue, the Grecian Temple, the Gothic Temple, and the Palladian Bridge, not to mention many other monuments of minor interest, while at every point inscriptions were at hand to tell you what to admire and to supply the appropriate sentiments. Shenstone, at Leasowes, was even more solicitous for his visitors, for in places of more than ordinary interest on his farm he would put a Gothic seat " still more particularly characterised by an inscription in obsolete language and the black letter." This was the practical result of the pro- IV. THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 85 cess described by Walpole in a sentence, which is probably his masterpiece in claptrap : " Kent leapt the fence and sayv that all nature was a garden." Kent was followed by " Capability " Brown, who began as a kitchen gardener, but took the judicious line that knowledge hampered origin- ality. He accordingly dispensed with any training in design, and rapidly rose to eminence. Brown's notion of a landscape consisted of a park encircled by a belt of trees, a piece of ornamental water, and a clump — the latter indispensable ; and on these lines he proceeded to cut down avenues and embellish nature with the utmost aplomb. He died in 1783, and was succeeded by Humphrey Repton and other professors of landscape gardening, who between them irrevocably destroyed some of the finest gardens in England. Two instances will show the taste of these men. One of them advised, as an improvement to Powis Castle, that a precipitous rock in front of the Castle with a stone balustraded terrace and stairs should be blown up, in order to make a uniform grassy slope to the Castle ; and in Repton's Landscape Gardening appears the following remark : " The motley appearance of red bricks with white stone, by breaking the unity of effect, will often destroy the magnificence of the most splendid compositions," and he accordingly recommends that the bricks should be covered with plaster and stone colour. The garden front of 86 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. Hampton Court is a sufficient answer to such a grotesque statement. The principles of landscape gardening, or rather certain assumptions which do duty for principles, were first formulated by Thomas Wheatly, in his Observations on Modern Gardening, published in 1776, which became the standard book on the Jardin Anglais, and has, so far as any theory is con- cerned, remained so ever since. Wheatly further signalised himself by completely destroying the remains of the formal gardens at Nonsuch in 1786. Horace Walpole published an Essay on Modern Gardening in 1785, in which he repeated what other writers had said on the subject. This was at once translated and had a great circulation on the continent. The Jardin a I' Anglais e became the rage ; many beautiful old gardens were destroyed in France and elsewhere, and Scotch and English gardeners were in demand all over Europe to renovate gardens in the English manner. It is not an exhilarating thought that in the one instance in which English taste in a matter of design has taken hold on the continent, it has done so with such disastrous results. It is not to be supposed, however, that this new view of gardening took immediate and complete possession of England. Fashions travelled slowly in the eighteenth century, and many a formal garden in provincial towns and country places was laid out in the older style IV. THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 87 as late as the beginning of this century. The terrace and great staircase of Prior Park, near Bath, designed by Wood, the architect, is one of the finest examples still in existence in England of garden architecture ; and the terrace at Brympton, in Somersetshire, is said to have been constructed early in this century. Moreover, men of real cultivation began to resent the destruction of places which for them, at least, were instinct with scholarly associations, and the cant and fallacies of the landscapist were too transparent to pass unchallenged. Sir Uvedale Price, a man of independent views and consider- able intelligence, was perhaps the first to see the error of his ways. In his essay on The Decorations near the House, he tells of an old garden of his own, in two divisions, all walled in, with terraces and summer-house and rich wrought iron gates. This garden he destroyed, with no pleasure to himself, as he confesses, and with no motive except that of being in the fashion. He says that he succeeded at much expense in making his grounds like anybody else's and like the fields outside, but lost for ever the seclusion, the charm, the dis- tinction of his old-fashioned garden. Price^ advocated a threefold division — the garden immediately round the house was to be formal, the garden beyond to be in the landscape style, and the park to be left to itself. His idea was that the transition should be gradual, and this 88 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. idea was worked upon by Sir Charles Barry in laying out the gardens of Trentham Hall and other places. This, however, shows a mis- apprehension of the intention of the formal garden as a matter of design. Instead of the transition being gradual, there should be no question where the garden ends. As Price himself pointed out, half the charm of the older garden was its contrast with the surrounding scenery, the clean line of demarcation given by a good brick wall, or at least an iron railing on a low brick plinth, with the background of the trees beyond. As for the vaunted ha-ha, it is little better than a silly practical joke, and in point of fact was not invented by Kent at all, but was known to the French designers of the seventeenth century, for the ha-ha is named and described as a common feature in gardens in The Theory and Practice of Gardening, 1712. The last word of protest was written by Sir W. Scott. In 1827 he wrote a paper on " Gardens " for The Giuarterly, which appeared in 1828 as a review of Sir Henry Stewart's Planter s Guide. In this he pointed out the irreparable folly of destroying these formal gardens, and the fallacy of claiming for landscape gardening that it was loyal to nature ; or that Milton, who of all men loved the formal garden, was in any sense identified with the introduction of landscape gardening. The paper contains a charming description of the garden of Barncluith, in IV. THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN 89 Lanarkshire, an old garden of the eighteenth century laid out by one of the Millars, " full of long straight walks, betwixt hedges of yew and hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side." Scott also describes an old garden at Kelso which he first saw in 1783. In his journal for 29th August 1827 he notes that " the yew hedges, labyrinths, wildernesses . . . are all obliterated, and the place is as common and vulgar as may be." In 1829 Felton published his Gleanings on Gardens. Since that date the question of garden design seems to have lost interest for the public. An article appeared in The (Quarterly .in 1842 on London's Encyclo- pedia., and a paper in The Carthusian for 1845. The writer of the latter essay supported the old formal garden with a wealth of scholarly allusion, and the same ground was taken up by Mrs. Francis Foster in a cliarming little book called The Art of Gardening., published in 1881. Until quite recently little attention has been paid to the formal garden. The landscape gardener has had it all his own way, so much so that he has ceased to think it necessary to lavish that abuse on the formal school which used to be the regular preface to his disser- tations. Some very successful attempts, however, in formal gardens have been made within the last thirty years. Arley and Penshurst are well-known instances. The latter was laid out by Lord Delisle with the help of his architect. Fig. 17. IV. THE LANDSCAPE SCHOOL 91 George Devey, and is perhaps one of the most beautiful gardens in England or anywhere else. Of contemporary designers it would be unbe- coming to speak. The late George Devey and W. Eden-Nesfield ought to be mentioned as architects who made a delibei-ate and very successful effort to design the house and grounds in relation to each other, and this principle, carrying with it the full appreciation of the formal method of gardening, is now generally accepted by those who consider that architecture is a fine art, and not a mere matter of business or building police. Looking generally at the history of garden- ing in England, one cannot but admit that the disappearance of formal gardening and the chaos which followed was due to the abuse of the system itself. The note of warning uttered by Rea and Worlidge was not heeded. The designer became so intent on showing his skill in design that he forgot that a garden is a place for real flowers and grass, and not for conventional flowers mapped out on the ground in different coloured sands. Some of the designs for parterres in James's translation are melancholy instances of per-verted taste. Formal gardening fell into its dotage, and the vanity of technique overpowered the reserve and sobriety and genuine love of nature which guided the earlier masters, and this was the justification, in fact, of the violent change that 92 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv. occurred in the eighteenth century. But the change was thrust upon us by people who not only had no sympathy with the older system, but by their absence . of training were quite unqualified to judge whether that system was good or bad. The consequence was that the good went down with the bad, and the funda- mental principle of the relation between the garden and the house was completely lost sight of, though that principle had been accepted as a matter of course throughout all the greatest periods of English art. CHAPTER V THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS The advice given by the earlier seventeenth- century writers as to sites does not precisely agree with the instances still in existence. Markham, in his Country Farm, advises that the house and garden should be placed on high ground, just under the brow of a hill for preference, with an east aspect, or a south aspect " borrowing somewhat of the east, for the winds blowing from those quarters are drie, more hot than cold, but very wholesome, as 9+ THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. well for the body as for the spirit of man." Thomas Hill had already made the astounding statement that the east wind is hotter than the west, simply transcribing from Latin and Italian writers. In spite of this, Hill recommended a south-west aspect, and this in England is usually considered the safest on the whole. Both writers advise against placing the house on low ground, or near moats or standing water. Lawson, however, advised that the orchard should be planted on low ground by a river, and this was repeatedly done in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Great noblemen's houses, such as Wollaton, Bolsover, and Hardwick, were some- times built on the tops of hills, but men of lesser means seem to have liked the shelter of low-lying ground, and the custom of placing the house on the highest and most conspicuous part of the estate was not fully established till the end of the eighteenth century. Markham's arrangement of house and grounds has been described in the second chapter, and the general principle of it remained unaltered till the introduction of landscape gardening. In front of the hojis^ was the fore court, walled in on every side, with an entrance in the centre, opposite the door of the house ; on one side was the base court, or bass court, as it came to be called, which included all the stables and farm-buildings ; on the other side were the pleasure gardens, with a terrace along the side V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 95 of the house, as at Montacute, and at the back of the house the fruit and kitchen gardens. This arrangement, however, was by no means universal. The fore court and one or more bass courts nearly always existed, but their relative positions were modified to suit the necessities of the site. In old prints and draw- ings it is not always easy to classify the courts. James, in his Theory of Gardening, distinguishes between the fore cou rt, the ca stle cou rt or house cou rt, and the ba ss cou rts, and this is a very convenient classification. The house court is the court immediately in front of the house, surrounded on three sides by the centre block and two wings of the house. The fore court is the court or courts in front of this, givmg access from the entrance to the house court. The bass courts are the courts to the right or left of the fore court, or on both sides of it, or even at the back of the house, comprising the stables and inferior buildings. Kip's views show several different arrangements of the courts. The house court was usually paved over its entire surface, or two square grass plots were left with broad flagged paths round the sides and down the middle. This court was raised above the fore court, and separated from it by a balustrade or an iron railing on a dwarf wall, with a flight of steps opposite the central path. Fine instances existed at Badminton and Newn- ham Paddox, in Warwickshire, and at Bretby, in 96 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. Derbyshire, now destroyed. Kip's view of the latter shows a wide paved path the full width of the centre bay of the facade, with grass plots on either side spaced out with standard-trees in cases. At Althorp the house court was separated from the fore court by a moat, with a bridge opposite the outer entrance to the fore court. In some instances, and particularly in the case of houses built after the middle of the seventeenth century, a terrace running along the front of the facade took the place of the house court, as at Chatsworth before it was altered. Wrest House, in Bedfordshire, Wimple, in Cambridgeshire, and the house of Sir W. Blackett at Newcastle (Kip, 54) ; and eventually, as the quadrangular plan for the house was abandoned, and the long symmetrical facade superseded the |-| or half j-j plan, the house court slipped out of use, and the fore court was brought up immediately in front of the entrance door of the house, as in old Burlington House (Kip, 29). Few instances remain of the house court proper, owing to the inconvenience of having to walk a considerable distance from the carriage to the front door ; but examples of what are practically house courts still exist in old almshouses, as, for instance, in the almshouse at Etwall, in Derbyshire. The fore court lasted well into the eighteenth century. The simplest form of a fore court is a square walled -in enclosure in front of the V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 97 entrance door, with a gateway in the centre of the wall to the road, and either buildings or plain walls on either side. There were usually pavilions of more or less importance in the angles next the road. There is a comparatively perfect instance of a simple fore court at Wotton Lodge, in Staffordshire. The carriage road sweeps round a circular grass plot up to a grand flight of twenty-five steps to the entrance door. This arrangement of a plain circular or oval plot of grass in the centre of the court, with a foun- tain or statue in the middle was very generally used in the seventeenth century ; but Switzer, writing in 17 18, says that the custom was being abandoned, because it diminished the space avail- able for coaches, and the courts were more often paved with different coloured stones laid chequerwise, or in circular or star -shaped designs. In the smaller houses the fore court was simply a square enclosure, with a paved path from the gate to the front door. There is an excellent instance in existence at E yarn H alL in Derb^shice- On the left is the road to the offices, on the right the gardens. A small terrace with a low wall raised eight steps above the fore court runs in front of the house out to a door in the right-hand wall, by which access is given to the garden down a flight of five semicircular steps. A good view of a small fore court is given in Kennett's Parochial Antiquities (1695) view of Saresden Hall, since 3\ TFlRiOM ISSPS 4 m fc-V i •■■■ b luum Ego jttnCMOItlHB IBJi^liSTJitiTf TKIIliWJHIIHMill BmDK Fig. i8. V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 99 destroyed. The fore courts of these smaller houses are not always easy to discover. As a rule they only exist where the house has been allowed to decay, and the court is so abundantly filled with apple-trees and gooseberry bushes, that it appears as nothing more than an ordinary kitchen garden in front of a tumbledown house. In larger houses the fore court was a very important feature. It extended at least the full width of the facade, but sometimes it was twice or three times that length. There was a grand fore court at Althorp . flanked by the stables on the left, and the gardens on the right ; the whole of the space in front of the house was gravelled ; to the right and left of this were two grass plots divided and surrounded by broad gravel paths. The entrance was usually in the centre, but in some cases, as in the Earl of Burlington's house at Chiswick (Kip, 30), the entrance was placed to one corner. At New Park^ in Surrey (Kip, 33), the entrance was in the centre, but the walls on either side, instead of continuing the line of the gates, formed the side walls by reversed curves. At Bretby, in Derbyshire, the fore court was oblong, running the whole length of bass court, house, and garden, with iron gates and grilles at each end, and a fountain in a semi- circular bay opposite the centre of the house ; a raised walk with a row of polled trees ran parallel to the fore court on the side to the house, and was separated from the house court V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS loi by an iron grille. The fore court was often repeated, so that there were two or three fore courts ; at Newnham Paddox there were three such courts with gateways leading from one to the other. At Orchard Portman there was an outer fore court separatedTfrorfTthe inner fore court by a wall and two -storey gatehouse. Kip's view of the old gardens at Longleat shows a very remarkable fore court. The outer court was only separated from the park by a •fence, with a wrought -iron gateway leading to the fore court proper. A broad flagged causeway led from the gates to the front door, with flights of fifteen steps leading to a lower terrace on either side in front of the house. The sides of this causeway were formed apparently with grass slopes ; on either side of it were grass lawns at a lower level than the terrace, with circular basins and fountains in the centre. The eff^ect of such an arrangement must have been quite magnifi- cent. The whole of it was swept away by Capability Brown ; and the utter insignificance of the present approach shows the full capacity for mischief of the landscape system. At old Eaton Hall the outer court was formed by a semi- circular wall, extending beyond the full width of the inner fore court sufficiently far to admit of gateways into the base courts on either side of the inner fore court. This is a simple and masterly plan. The fore court at Westwood, in Worcestershire, was laid out lozenge-wise, with 102 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. a gatehouse In the centre and three-storey pavilions at the two angles. These instances are enough to show that the fore court was not tied down to one uniform plan, but might be varied indefinitely to meet the conditions of the house and gpounds. The house court was abandoned for the practical reason that it prevented a carriage drawing up at the front door ; but no such objection holds against the fore court. It gives privacy to the house, and when properly planned, provides a convenient means of grouping the stables and outbuildings with the main block of the house. Existing instances show that there is no reason why it should not be applied to small country houses as well as to big ones. Nothing can be meaner than the carriage drive and rhododendron bed which usually form a miserable apology for a fore court proper. The advantages of a fore court where the ground is shut in by a road in front and buildings at the sides are obvious. The terrace is admitted, even by the land- scapist, to be desirable near the house. In the first place, it presents to the eye a solid founda- tion for the house to start from, and gives the house itself greater importance by raising it above the level of the adjacent grounds, and again it is healthier. There is something un- comfortable in the idea of a house placed flat on the ground or down in a hole. It need not V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 103 necessarily be damp, but one always imagines that it will, and that the timber will decay, and the plaster moulder, and rats run over the floor ; but when the house starts from a terrace it at least looks dry, and the terrace enables you to see the garden. The French author of The Theory of Gardening lays it down that there should always be a descent from the building to the garden of three steps at least. The main ter- race was always placed to overlook the principal garden. This might be either to the back of the house or to the left or right of it, according to circumstance. It has been given as a rule for the width of such a terrace that it should be equal to the height of the house from the ground line to the eaves. This rule is so far good that it is likely to prevent those fetites manures mesquines, against which the French author warned designers, but it is not borne out by existing instances. The great terrace at Montacute, which overlooks the west garden, is about 45 feet wide, which is not much more than half the height of the building. On the other hand, the north terrace at Versailles measures about 120 feet wide by 820 long; the terrace at Bolsover, in Derbyshire, about 300 feet long by 50 feet wide. The proportions of a t errace depend_ not only on the height of the buil ding, but on the len gth of the terrac e itself. In Marshall Tallard's garden the house terrace was 60 feet long by 14 wide. 104 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. Switzer says the house terrace can hardly be too wide, and that, as a rule, in England they were much too narrow. He gives a plan of a terrace i oo feet wide, but as it was to be divided into ten strips of grass, gravel, and paving, it can hardly be_^ considered a terrace so much as a terrace garden. For the side terrace, he says, the width should not be less than 20 feet or more than 40. In The Theory of Gardening a terrace, shown on the third plate, scales 40 feet wide to 190 feet long, which is not a very happy proportion. It is impossible to lay down any definite rule for the proportions of a terrace, but, generally speaking, the tendency is to make them too narrow. Another important con- sideration is the height of the terrace above the garden. On sloping ground this will probably determine itself ; but where the terrace is almost entirely artificial, it is not much use making the level of the terrace less than 2 to 3 feet above the garden, and, for effect, the higher the better, within certain limits. Where, however, the fall of the ground is very sudden, it is best to make the terrace in two levels — that is, an upper and a lower terrace, communicating by flights of stairs. At Kingston House, Brad- ford-on- A von, the difficulty is got over in a very skilful way. The house is raised 12.0 above the lower garden ; in front of the house is a terrace 24 feet wide, with a flight of fourteen steps in the centre, descending to a grass plat- io6 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. form with mitred slopes. The path runs to right and left, and descends to the lower garden by flights of seven steps ; off this path, on either side of the terrace walls, two steps ascend to grass terraces, 27 feet wide and 52 paces and 29 paces long respectively, which run under the walls of the upper gardens to right and left of the house. The terrace should be made with a slight fall away from the house of about i^ inches in 10 feet. The side of the terrace to the garden may be formed either with brickwork or masonry, or with a grass slope. Details of the first will be given under the head of Garden Archi- tecture. Where a grass slope is used, the point to aim at is to keep the verge of the terrace well defined, and to ensure this the slope of the bank should form an unmistak- able angle with the ground both at its top and its base. A gradually curved slope is useless ; it defeats the whole purpose of the terrace by merging it into the garden, and where the landscape gardener uses a slope he makes it much too flat. Switzer gave 2^ hori- zontal to I perpendicular for the slope, on the ground that anything steeper than this cannot be mowed or rolled ; but this, for the effect of a terrace, is too flat. The proportion generally used by the French gardeners of the seventeenth century was -f to i ^ — that is, ^ T/ie Theory ar.d Practice of Gardening. V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 107 f of the height for the horizontal length j of the slope ; but it was also made on the [ diagonal of the square, and in some cases at an angle still more obtuse, in order to prevent the moisture running off too quickly, and save the grass along the top from withering in summer. About i-| width to i of height is a good general rule. If the terrace involves much made ground along the outer edge, care must be taken to build up the earth, to prevent its slipping down. The Theory of Gardening advises the following practice : — " After having laid the earth i foot high, be- ginning at bottom, you must spread upon it a bed of Fascines, or Hurdles (made of willow), 6 foot wide, in rows one against another, and dispose them so that the great ends or roots may lie next the face of the slope, and come within a foot of the sur- face ; then lay another bed of earth upon this, and continue the same to the top. Over this wattled work you lay the turf, after covering it with a little earth." A method of strengthening banks somewhat similar to this is recommended by William Lawson. The terrace next the house was either gravelled or paved. A splendid instance of a paved terrace, the full width of the garden, existed at Longleat, and several others are shown in Kip. Besides the terrace next the house, a terrace io8 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. was often formed parallel to it at the opposite end of the garden. In the earlier gardens of the seventeenth century this was almost invariably done. In the gardens described and figured by Markham and Lawson the " mount," or raised walk at the end of the garden, with garden- houses at either end, was an indispensable feature. There is a good example of this in Fig. 21. — Hales Place.' ruins, dating from the middle of the sixteenth century, at Place Hous e, near Tenterden, in Kent. The garden, wKich is all walled in, measures 47 paces wide by 92 long. It is now a grass field. At the end of the garden opposite to the house is a raised walk with brick-retaining wall on the garden side, and 1 Hales Place, or Place House, Tenterden, was a seat of the Hales family. It is now a farm-house, and is usually called Place House. V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 109 a wall 8.0 high on the outer side of the walk. The walk is 16 feet wide, 5.0 high above the garden level, and 41.0 paces long. It is reached by a flight of nine steps in the centre from the garden. At each end of the walk are octagonal garden - houses in two storeys-, the ground floor entered from the garden. On six sides of the houses there are two light windows with four-centred heads. The ground floor is paved with bricks ; the first floor has a wood floor, and the walls are plastered. All the details are in brick, with mouldings worked in plaster to look like stone, and evi- dently date from before the middle of the sixteenth century. At Brickwall , in Sussex, there is a grass walk 9 feet wide and about 130 feet long, with seats at either end, which separates the garden from the park ; this is raised six steps above the garden. At Rycott. in Oxfordshire, there existed a magnificent raised walk along the top of a one-storey building, surmounted by a balustrade. This was reached by double flights of steps from the garden, with an elaborate pavilion raised on the terrace opposite the steps. Every vestige of this garden has disappeared but one old cedar. The terrace was frequently continued round the two remaining sides of the garden, so that a commanding view of the garden is got from every side, as at Montacute. In this garden the terrace next the house has a wall V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS iii on the garden side. The other three terraces are formed with a grass slope to the gardens and flights of steps in the centre of every side. At Brickwall there is a rather unusual variation. There is no terrace in front of the house, but a paved brick path with flights of six steps at either end communicates with a raised walk 8.9 wide, which runs round the other three sides of the garden. The garden itself is raised three steps above the level of the path in front of the house. Raised walls, as described above, are shown in Logan's views of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and Balliol and Oriel at Oxford. Bowling-greens were usually surrounded by" raised terraces, and in important gardens terraces or causeways were sometimes laid out across the middle of the garden to enable the parterres to be properly seen. There is a good instance of this in the Privy Garden a t Hampton Court, and another at Packwood. Switzer says these terraces should be raised between 2.6 and 2-6 above the garden. The terrace at Risley, in Derbyshire, is at some distance from the house, and runs along one side of the garden and beyond it. The terrace is separated from the garden by a long narrow piece of water, which was probably dug out to form the terrace. The terrace rises some 9 feet above this water, with a retaining wall of masonry and a heavy stone balustrade above it. It is reached from the garden by a flight of seven steps rising over V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 113 the bridge, with a rather elaborate stone gate- way. The terrace is 289.0 paces long, and is in two levels. That next the balustrade is 14 feet wide and gravelled. Above this is a grass walk, 25 feet wide, with box -hedges, and a ha-ha on the side to the park. Part of the balustrade has been removed, and now encloses the playground of the Grammar School. The terraces hitherto described are such as might be made in ground with a slight fall. Hanging gardens are a form of terrace, but it is best to distinguish the two. The terrace is specifically a walk raised above the adjacent ground, with a certain proportion between the length and width, whereas a hanging garden is in the nature of a raised platform, which may be as broad as it is long, or any other width and any height.^ These hanging gardens were going out of fashion in Worlidge's time, probably because of their great expense in making ; but in certain cases they were rendered necessary by the ground. Camden says of Holdenby House, built for Hatton in 1583 : "Above all is especially to be noted with what industry and toyle of man the garden hath been raised, levelled, and formed out of a most craggye and unprofitable piece of ground, now framed a most pleasant, sweete, ^ The distinction can be well seen at Penshurst, where, in front of the house, there is a broad platform of turf raised above the garden level, and the terrace proper runs down one side of the garden. 1 114 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. and princely place." The gardens of Haddon Hall are well known. They are laid out in four main levels ; at the top is a raised walk 70 paces long by 15 wide, planted with a double row of lime-trees. About 10 feet below this is the yew-tree terrace, divided into three plots, about 15 yards square, surrounded by stone curbs, with yew-trees in each angle. These were once clipped, but are now grown into great trees overshadowing the entire terrace. Dorothy Vernon's stairs descend on to this yew-tree terrace. A flight of twenty-six steps led from this terrace to a lower garden about 40 yards square, divided into two grass plots. A walk from this garden skirted round two sides of a second garden laid out in three levels, and reached the postern door in the outer garden-wall by seventy-one steps laid out in seven consecutive flights. The original gardens at Chatsworth were laid out as a succession of terrace gardens, but the greater part of this was destroyed by Paxton. " Queen Mary's Bower," at Chatsworth, is a curious instance of what must be called a hanging garden ; it is a square enclosure on a raised platform, with retaining walls and open parapet surrounded by a moat. This was probably a garden of herbs. Kip's view of New Park, in Surrey, shows a large garden, cut out in the side of a hill, with a high double embankment above it, and an embankment in three levels below. The house V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 115 stood at the bottom of the hill. This is an exceedingly foolish arrangement. The garden would be invisible from the house except to a person standing on the top of the chimney. If you must have hanging gardens, it is better, as Worlidge pointed out, to have them below the house than above it, and riot to put the terraces too close together — that is to say, to keep the level pieces (what the French used to call the plein pied) as wide as possible, otherwise you are in a constant state of going up and down stairs. In The Theory of Gardening a third method of dealing with sloping ground is given. This dispensed with terraces and left the ground on a slope, but provided at intervals elaborate landing-places, called generally " amphitheatres," with " easy ascents and flights of steps for com- munication, with front paces, counter- terraces, volutes, rolls, banks, and slopes of grass, placed and disposed with symmetry," and further adorned with figures and fountains. This was considered in France the most magnificent way of dealing with a slope, but fortunately it was seldom adopted in England. Such a treatment would be exceedingly costly to carry out and maintain, and would look very silly when it was done. The utter contempt for design of the land- scape gardener is shown most conspicuously in his treatment of paths. He lays them about at random, and keeps them so narrow that they ii6 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. look like threads, and there is barely room to walk abreast, and he makes a particular point of planting trees and bushes in the way, to give him an opportunity of winding his path, and then taking credit to himself for subordinating his paths to " nature." The width and propor- tion of paths and their relation to the amount of turf on either side is a point of the greatest importance in garden design. In the seventeenth century it was taken for granted that all paths should be straight. Lawson says " One principall end of orchards is recreation by walks, and universallie walks are straight," and the main walks of the garden were always wide enough at the least for two or three people to walk abreast. Markham gives 14 feet as a minimum width for main paths. He advises that the alleys be made in three divisions — a broad walk in the middle, 7 or 8 feet wide at the least, covered with sand or small gravel, or even fine coal-dust, and on either side a width of grass of the same width as the centre alley. Thus, the sandy walk bemg 7 feet wide, the entire alley, including the grass on either side, will be 21 feet across. Markham notices that the French paved or tiled their centre paths, but he preferred our gravel. The centre path is to be slightly raised in the centre to throw off wet. A useful caution is given by Meager (1670) that the fall to either side from the centre should be so slight as to be hardly dis- V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 117 cernible, for " a great fall is unhandsome, and uneasie for such as wear high-heeled shoes." Markham gives as practical reasons for his triple walk — ( i ) That the contrast of colours, of the green of the grass and the yellow of the sand, is delightful to the eye, for " beauty is nothing but an excellent mixture or consent of colours, as in the composition of a delicate woman, the grace of her cheeke is the mixture of red and white, the wonder of her eye, blacke and white, and the beauty of her hand blew and white"; (2) if your walks are all grass, you trample down part by treading on it, and make it shabby and ill-favoured ; (3) that after dew and rain you cannot walk on it at all. Another form of triple walk is given by Worlidge, who classifies walks under three heads. (1) The best, he says, are made with stone " about the breadth of 5 foot in the midst of a gravel walk of about 5 or 6 feet gravel on each side the stone, or of grasse, which you please." (2) Gravel walks. These are good to be laid out under fruit walls, because they reflect the sun better than grass, and should be made in the following manner: — Remove all the surface earth and all roots from the subsoil for a depth of 8 or 9 inches. Fill in with coarse unscreened gravel (or broken bricks) for 5 or 6 inches, level and well ram it, and lay over the surface a final coat of fine gravel 2 or 3 inches thick. If moss appears, you are to rake ii8 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. up the top coat and roll it again. To prevent the earth at the sides from mixing with the gravel and causing weeds and moss, the sides should be supported with two or three courses of brickwork, or bricks set on end, edge to edge, the top of the bricks to be about an inch below the surface. To prevent the gravel disintegrating in frost, a coating of sea- shells or brick refuse broken up fine is useful. On either side of the gravel walk verges of turf should be formed for use in hot weather ; the grass may be separated from the gravel by stone edging rising 3 or 4 inches above the surface of the path.^ Switzer gives a rule for the section of the path. It should be i inch rise to 5 feet in width ; thus if a path is 20 feet wide, it ought to be 4 inches higher in the middle than at the sides. (3) Green walks, made either by laying turf or by " raking them fine and sowing them with hay-dust or seed, which may be had at the bottom of a hay-mow " (of course good grass seed would now be used). They should be very slightly rounded at the top, and have a water table on either side 2 to 3 inches deep. The flower garden described by Worlidge practically consisted of three such paths as the last, with flower-beds between. It was to be oblong in shape, forming the centre ^ In the quadrangle of New College, Oxford, the oval of turf is raised some 3 to 4. inches above the gravel ; a small stone curb rises 2 inches or so above the gravel, and the edge of the turf is flush with its face. By this means a perfectly true edge is kept. V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 119 third of a square, of which the other two-thirds were occupied by the kitchen gardens and orchard. The flower garden was to consist of a broad gravel walk, with borders of flowers, with green walks beyond these borders, and borders of perennials planted between the green walks and the palisades. London and Wise in The Retired Gard'ner say that in a garden of 4 acres the main path parallel to the house should be at least 20 feet wide, the path down the centre and the walks at the sides and ends 15 feet, and inter- mediate paths 1 2 feet wide ; all alleys should have a border of grass or flowers 3 feet wide on either side, and they add, in a note, " We generally make our alleys 2 foot broad for passing, 5 foot for wheeling, and 7 foot for two persons to walk abreast in." " Walks " are dealt with in some detail in The Theory of Gardening. The author distinguishes between " single walks," with a single row of trees or a palisade on either side, and " double walks," which consisted of a broad walk in the middle, with smaller walks at the sides. The side walks were separated from the centre walks by a line of single trees, and from the grounds by a palisade breast high. These side walks were called counter walks. They were usually made half the width of the centre walk. For instance, if the entire walk was 48 feet wide, the centre walk would be 24 feet wide, the side walks 1 2 I20 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. feet each ; but the counter walks should never be less than 6 feet wide at the least. " The best way to gravel walks," he continues, " is to make a bed of mason's rubble or "stone dust, lay at the bottom 7 or 8 inches thickness of the coarser stone or gallets, and upon that about 2 inches thickness of the finest dust that has been run through a sieve. Let this be beaten three several times with the Beater, after having been well watered each time, and then spread the gravel upon it, which also should be well beaten. When you lay a bed of saltpetre over this mason's dust, as is done in making a mall or Base to bowl on, it should be beat eight or nine times." Coarse gravel or pebbles may be used instead of mason's dust. He admits that this way of gravelling is " very chargeable," and that in ordinary cases 2 inches of gravel well beaten and rolled may do. " Draining wells should be made at convenient distances of flint and dug stones." Another method is to make a deep V groove under the length of the path, and fill up with boulders and smaller stones to form a continuous drain. As to the dimensions of great walks, the French author gives a width of from 30 to 36 feet for a walk 600 feet long, 42 to 48 for 1200 feet, 54 to 60 for 1800 feet, and so on. The Broad Walk at Hampton Court, as laid out by Wise in 1699, was 2264 long by 39 feet wide. Besides the main walks of the garden there V. THE COURTS, TERRACES, WALKS 121 are the small paths between beds and parterres. In The Gardener s Labyrinth 3 or 4 feet is given as the width for such an alley covered with sand, and i foot as the width for the cross path between the beds. One foot to i Fig. 24. — From The Gardener's Labyrinth. foot 6 inches continued to be a common width for the paths inside parterres down to the end of the eighteenth century. At Bellair, in King's County, Ireland, there is a parterre of clipped box along the upper side of the kitchen garden in which the width is 16 inches. This was laid 122 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. out in 1790. Rea gives a few particulars of the alleys to the fret of his flower garden. These were to be 2 feet 6 inches between the fret, gravelled and rolled and separated from the beds by a rail 5 inches by i^ thick, carefully gauged and levelled and painted white, kept in position by stout wooden pins about 1 8 inches long, nailed to the rail and driven into the ground. The rail was to be 4 inches above the surface of the path and the grass i inch. This rule for the height of the grass above the path is still given by landscape gardeners. The small alleys running in and out of the different parts of the fret communicated with a broad path 1 7 feet 6 inches wide, running round the four sides of the entire fret. Instead of the plank, Rea says box- edging will do for a border to beds and grass, but all the borders to the walks should be set with these planks. A charming walk is described by Lawson in dealing with the fences of his orchard. The best fence, he says, is a hedge with a mount or double ditch ; the ditches are to be 2 yards wide and 4 feet deep. Between them is to be formed a walk 6 feet wide, raised some 5 or 6 feet above the level of the orchard or garden. The outer bank of this walk is to be planted with thorn, the inner with cherry, plum, damson, bulks, or filbert, and the trees to be trimmed to any form you fancy. At each corner of the walk and in the middle of each side " a mound 124 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND v. would be raysed, whereabout the woode might claspe, powdered with woodebinde." Switzer mentions a terrace walk at the end of a garden 12 to 20 feet wide, 2 to 3 feet above the garden, with a parapet wall on the outer side, and a graft or ditch to separate it from the park 15 feet wide and 5 deep. This sounds rather bare and uninviting after Lawson's beautiful idea. |VIF?>y QF FORECOURT SHEWIMG OME OF THE BWILIOMS I MOMTACPTE CHAPTER VI KNOTS, PARTERRES, GRASS-WORK, MOUNTS, BOWLING-GREENS, THEATRES The ordinary modern flower-bed is ugly in form and monotonous in colour, and it seems to be thought necessary to border it with the ugly lobelia, regardless of the colours of the flower- bed itself. All the fancy has gone out of it, and little or no attempt is made to lay out the beds on any consecutive scheme. Contrast this with the beds of the old gardens of New College, now destroyed.^ In front of the entrance gateway there was a broad path about 1 8 feet wide, with cross paths subdividing the garden into four square plots. On the right- hand plot as you entered was worked, probably in rosemary, hyssop, or thyme, the arms of New College and the motto " manners makyth man " and the date. In the next plot was a curious device in flowers. On the left hand was planted the royal arms and the date 1628 ; and the ^ Logan's Oxonia Illustrata. 126 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. plot beyond was laid out as an enormous sun- dial, the hours probably shown in box or rose- mary on an oval of sand, with an upright dial formed of wood in the centre, piivit^r de Serre§ mentions a similar sundial, in which a single cypress formed the dial.^ Such a ITME TUlfiHAN OUDSHGIVlViQn; Fig. 26. garden, if it had been preserved, would have been beyond all price to us now. The ridicule with which such work is dismissed, the abuse- lavished on it as artificial, is beside the mark. It is just this very artifice, this individuality, this human interest, that gives to the old formal garden its undying charm — the feeling that once there was a man or a woman who cared about Theatre d* Agriculture^ p. 531. VI. KNOTS, PARTERRES, GRASS-WORK 127 the garden enough to have it laid out in one way more than another, and that they and many generations since have taken pleasure in its beauty and the fancy of its parterres. Perhaps, when any tradition of art is formed among us again, there will return this pleasure and the delight in those old ways which are the better. In the sixteenth century the flower-beds were commonly square. The author of The Gardeners Labyrinth advises that they should be kept to such a size as that " the weeder's handes may. well reach into the middest of the bed " ; 12 feet by 6 is given as the size. Each bed was to be raised about i foot above the ground, but 2 feet in marshy ground. The edges were to be cased in with stout planks framed into square posts with finials at the angles, with intermediate supports. Rea, in his Flora, a hundred years later, advises beds and the various parts of the frets for flowers to be formed with planks in much the same way, but the plank side was only to be 4 inches high. Beds raised in this way about 1 8 inches above the adjacent paths, and bordered with box-edgings, can still be seen in the gardens at Versailles. Besides the square flower-beds, a more intricate form of bed, designed to fill up a square plot, was much in use. This latter was called a " knot." In the sixteenth century it seems to have been usually formed with rosemary, hyssop. 128 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. and thyme. Five designs for knots are given in The Gardener s Labyrinth, which were to be formed entirely of hyssop or thyme. In The Countrie Housewife's Garden (1617) Lawson gives " divers new knots for gardens," viz. : — Cinkfoyle Flowers de luce Lozenges , Grose-boowe Trefoyle Frette Diamond Ovall Maze All the flowers and herbs for these should, he says, be planted by Michaeltide. The borders were to be of " Roses, thorne. Lavender, rosemaris, isop, sage, or such like," and filled in with cowslips, primroses, and violets, " DafFy- downdillies," sweet Sissely, " go to bed at noone," and all sweet flowers, and, chief of all, with gillyflowers, the favourite flower of the English Renaissance — " July flowers, commonly called Gillyflowers,^ or clove Jully flowers (I call them so because they flower in July) ; they have the names of cloves of their scent. I may well call them the king of flowers (except the rose). Of all flowers (save the Damaske rose) they are the most pleasant to sight and smell." Markham says that " Of all the best ornaments used in our English gar- ^ The name carnation gradually superseded the name gillyflower. Worlidge refers to it as the vulgar name for gillyflower. " Carnation" was at first used to describe one species, but came to be used for gilly- flowers in general. ^ IIIIIIIIIHIh. J ^IJUU^^---. i \ ■F"^^ f^L^J ^ ^!L/ « ^ 4 /^\aam ^pjjs ^ \A "tjimiHIM"!!"'!'"^ kilUUU'^ \u|i^uMUUIIi % C 6 130 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. dens, knots or mazes were the most ancient, and at this day of most use among the vulgar, the least respected with great ones." His list of knots contains: — Straight line knots Diamond knots, single and double Single knots Mixed knots Single Impleate of straight lines Plain and mixed Direct and circular These knots were formed with a border of box, lavender, or rosemary, i8 inches broad at the bottom, and clipped so close and level at the top as to form a table for the housewife to spread out clothes to dry on. Markham gives instructions how knots are to be set out from designs on paper by subdividing the square plot into a number of squares pro- portional to those on the paper, and adds that " You are to keep your level to a haire, for if you faill in it you faill in your whole work." He further describes two knots which anticipate the parterre de broderie. In the first you set out the lines of your design in germander or hyssop, and fill in the parts with different coloured earths and chalks, with camo- mile for green. By this means you may re- present armorial bearings or anything else, and a very poor affair it would probably have been. The other knot sounds much more attractive. You set out a plain knot, the larger the better. The different " thrids " of the knot, as Mark- VI. KNOTS, PARTERRES, GRASS-WORK 131 ham calls them, are to be planted with flowers of one colour. Thus in one you will place carnation gillyflowers, in another great white gillyflowers, in another blood red, or hya- cinths, or " dulippos." The knot will then appear as if " made of divers coloured ribans." The maze which appears in these descriptions of knots was evidently only a figure for a bed and not a labyrinth, such as the maze at Hatfield or Hampton Court. Meager gives some designs for knots and uses the term, but he does not describe them, and his designs are inferior to those of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Knots seem to have dropped out of use in the reign of Charles II. The word occurs in London and Wise's trans- lation of The Retired Gard'ner, and in James's translation ; but the writers only deal with parterres. The parterre was introduced from France. The old parterre corresponded to the English knot, except that it was much more elaborate. As early as 1600 Claude Mollet laid out par- terres of embroidery for Henri IV. at the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and St. Germain-en- Laye. Seven engravings of these are given in Olivier de Serres's Theatre d' Agriculture et mesnage des Champs, 1603. These were planted with flowers and grass edgings, and laid with coloured earths. The parterre was developed by Le Notre, and by the end of the 132 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. seventeenth century a systematic classification was arrived at, which divided parterres into four main heads.^ In James's translation of The Theory and Practice of Gardening they are given as follows : — " Parterres of embroid- ery, parterres of compartiment, parterres after the English manner, and parterres of cut- work. There are also parterres of water, but at present they are quite out of use." 1. Parterres de broderie were designs similar to embroidered work, planted with edgings of box and filled up with different coloured earths, such as black earth composed of iron filings, or the scales beaten off the anvils, or powdered red tiles, or charcoal, or yellow sand. The foliage of the design was called "branchings," the flowers " flourishings." 2. Parterres of compartiment are the same as the last, except that the design, instead of being single, is repeated both at the ends and the sides — that is to say, one quarter of the whole parterre gives the design, and to com- plete the entire parterre this quarter has only to be reversed and doubled, so that it is used up four times. 3. Parterres a V Anglais e were formed simply with grass cut into various patterns and bounded with box -edgings. Round the ^ The term parterre was used generally to signify one specific plot or compartment of a garden, which formed a single design complete in itself. • VI. KNOTS, PARTERRES, GRASS-WORK 133 whole parterre would run a sanded path, 2 to 3 feet wide, and then a border of flowers to separate it from the main walks. The terrace garden overlooking the piece d'eau des Suisses, at Versailles, is laid out with par- terres a FAnglaise, but this parterre was never a success in France, owing to the inferiority of the French to the English turf. 4. Parterres of cut -work admitted neither grass nor coloured earths, but every part of it between the box-edgings was to be planted entirely with flowers. The paths between each part were to be covered with yellow or white sand, and set out at regular spaces with large Dutch jars filled with flowers. London and Wise men- tion that it was once the custom to cover the paths with potter's clay, well beaten, with lees of oil. James specifies brick dust or tile sherds powdered. In parterres of cut -work all parts of the ground under the flowers and within the box-edgings were to be covered with fine sand. Round these parterres were planted borders from 4 to 6 feet wide, formed with a sharp rising in the middle, " like a carp's back." ^ These borders were either continuous all round the parterre or cut into short lengths by cross paths. They might be planted with flowers or formed entirely of grass, with two small 1 The Retired Gard'mr. 13+ THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. sanded paths on either side, or entirely of sand with a simple edging of box next the gravel walk. In the two last cases they would be set out with vases and flower -pots, or orange- trees in cases, with yews in between, spaced at regular intervals round the border. No yews or shrubs were to be permitted to grow more than 4 to 5 feet high, to avoid hiding the parterre. The -plates -bandes isolees of the French were detached borders of flowers having no relation to parterres. They were reserved for the choicest flowers, and were enclosed with borders of planks, such as those described by Rea, painted green. Composite parterres were formed by the combination of parterres de broderie with cut-work and so on. No instance of these parterres as at first planted has survived, and it could not possibly do so except in the case of the parterre a V Anglaise. Even the French author admits that they are costly to lay out, and always lose their form. On the whole the loss is not to be regretted, for the designs shown in James's translation, and particularly in Switzer's Ichno- graphia, are exceedingly absurd. The purpose of a garden — to make the most of flowers and velvety turf — was forgotten. The dignity of the older formal garden was lost in these intricate designs, which only led to a violent reaction in favour of what was considered to be nature un- adorned. Of all the parterres the parterre a VI. MOUNTS 135 V Anglais e was the least absurd, and the French- men thought little of it. What is one to think of a parterre laid out " with the mask-head of a griffin having bats' wings formed by the sides of grass -work, as the flourishes of the em- broidery form the nose, eyes, brows, mous- tache.s, and tuft upon the head of the mask." Much might be done with simple parterres of grass and flowers, but the elaborate system in fashion at the beginning of the eighteenth century was a pernicious abuse. It is significant that some of the silliest of its features — such as the use of coloured earths and broken tiles — have survived in the practice of the landscape gardener. Grass-work as an artistic quantity can hardly be said to exist in landscape gardening. It is there considered simply as so much background to be broken up with shrubs and pampas grass and irregular beds ; not as a means of eff^ect in itself, to be handled as a question of values, both in regard to colour and amount. Lawn- tennis has stopped some of the worse faults of the landscapist by necessitating a clear space of level lawn, which readily takes its place in any formal design. In the formal garden, grass-work would include all artificial works intended to be turfed — such as mounts, grass walks and banks, bowling- greens, and theatres. The mount was a common feature in English gardens as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. In the larger 136 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. gardens there were artificial mounts of con- siderable height raised at some distance from the house, and usually turfed and planted with trees. At the top might be a banqueting- house. Kig] s_view _of Dunham Massie, in Cheshire, shows a circular mount in four stages or terraces. Each stage was fenced in with a pole-hedge, and at the top was a garden-house with four gables. Leland {Itinerary, p. 60) says that at Wresehall, in Yorkshire, " in the orchardes were mountes, opere topiarii writhen about with degrees like turninges of cockelJ- shells, to cum to the top without paine." It is possible that mounts of this kind were suggested by a curious description of a medicinal garden given by Olivier de Serres, and referred to by Markham. De Serres gives two designs for these " montagnetes " (as he calls them) or mounts. One was to be circular in six stages, ascended by a continuous walk like the Tower of Babel ; the other was to be square in six stages, ascended by flights of steps at the four angles. The stages were to be 15 feet wide — 11 for the path and 4 for the border of herbs. Each stage was to be 6 to 8 feet high, with retaining walls of masonry, and the interior might be vaulted over as an inner chamber for preserving the plants in winter. The circular mount was 45 fathoms in diameter, the square 50 fathoms by 50 ; but De Serres suggests that these might be used on a very VI. MOUNTS 137 much smaller scale. Worlidge mentions the mount at Marlborough as the most considerable in England at his time. Mounts were usual in the smaller gardens as well. The square mount in New College garden still exists. The base of the mount measures about 40 paces by 40 ; the height is about 30 feet, but the original shape has been lost, and it is now entirely over- grown with trees and shrubs. There was a famous mount in Wadham Gardens, circular in plan, with an octagonal platform at the top reached by a double flight of steps. In the centre of this platform was a colossal figure of Atlas carrying the globe. This mount stood in the centre of the garden,^ but their position appears to have been arbitrary. The term was also used for the raised walk at the end of the garden.^ Lawson mentions " mountes whence you may shoote a Buck " among the causes of delight in an orchard. " When you behold in divers corners of your orcharde mounts of stone or woode curiously wrought within and without, or of earth covered with fruit-trees; Kentish cherry, damsones, plummes, etc., with staires of precious workmanship, and in some corner (or mo.) a true Dyall or clocke and some anticke workes, and especially silver-sounding musique, mixt instruments and voices gracing all the rest : ^ The Wadham mount still exists, but the Atlas and all that made it interesting have long since disappeared. - See A Platform for Ponds, reproduced from Markham. 138 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. how will you be rapt with delight ? ' Large walks, broad and long, close and open like the Tempe groves in Thessaly raised with gravel and sand, having seats and banks of camomile, all this delights the mind, and brings health to the body." The latest instance of a mount seems to have been the mount at New Park, in Surrey, which was laid out at the end of the seventeenth century, probably by London and Wise. The mount here was placed in the extreme upper right-hand corner to overlook the whole of the garden. Grass walks have been already referred to in dealing with paths. Bowling-greens existed in almost every old English garden of any size. Borde refers to them, and Markham distin- guishes between three sorts of bowling-grounds : (i) The bowling-alley; (2) "open grounds' of advantage " — that is, bowling-greens with a fall one way ; (3) level bowling-greens. In Country Contentments (chap, viii.) he says, " Your flat bowles, being the best for close allies, your round byazed bowles for open grounds of advantage, and your round bowles like a ball for greene swarthes that are plaine and levell." A terrace or raised walk about 2 feet high often ran round the bowling- green, as at Cusworth, in Yorkshire. At Badminton a raised walk ran round two sides of the green, and at one end was a second raised alley for skittles. The shape of the VI. BOWLING-GREENS 139 green was usually square, and it seems to have been placed indifferently at the back or sides of the house. In later work the bowling- green was sometimes placed at a distance from the house, and laid out circular. At Cashiobury, laid out by Cook for Lord Essex, the bowling- green was placed at the end of a long avenue, and surrounded by a circular belt of fir-trees. At Penshurst the green was put out in the middle of a field. / At Hampton Court the bowling-green is over half a mile from the palace. It is oval in plan and lies at the end of the Long Walk. This bowling-green is now planted over with trees. One of the pavilions remains; the other was destroyed in this cen- tury. Bowling-greens continued to be laid out in the eighteenth century. In Kip's view of Knole in Britannia Illustrata no bowling-green is shown ; but in Badeslade's view,^ made about twenty years later, a beautiful bowling-green is shown on the south side of the house. This was oval in plan, about 70 paces by 40, sur- rounded by a high clipped hedge with arbours on the east and west sides, and openings on the north and south. It was reached by a double flight of steps from the lower parterres in front of the house. From the fact that this is not shown in Kip, it is probable that it was made early in the eighteenth century. At Radley Col- 1 Badeslade's Vievis of Noblemen's and Gentlemen's Seats in the County of Kent. I40 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND- vi. lege, near Oxford, there is a long bowling-alley, probably of the same date as the original house — about the middle of the eighteenth century. At Stratford-on-Avon there exists a square bowling- green in excellent order, where, on the long summer evenings, the game is still played with much gravity and science. The object of a bowling-green as a playing-ground was never lost sight of in England. London and Wise mention that a custom had been introduced of planting tall trees round public bowling-greens " rather to pleasure their customers than for any advantage to their greens " ; but the green itself was always kept open. From England bowling-greens were introduced into France, probably by Le Notre. The French called them boulingrins, and quite lost sight of their original purpose, for they made them of all shapes and sizes, and as often as not put a statue or a fountain in the middle of the grass. In the French system the boulingrin only differed from the parterre in that the latter was planted round with shrubs only, while boulingrins were planted with trees — such as elms, horse-chestnuts, and acacias (James). In James's translation, boulingrins are defined as " hollow sinkings and slopes of Turf, which are practised either in the middle of very large grass walks and green plots, or in a grove, and sometimes in the middle of a parterre, after ' the English mode.' It is nothing but VI. GRASS THEATRES 141 a sinking that makes it a Bowling-green, to- gether with the grass that covers it." The depth of these bowling-greens would be about 2 feet in the larger instances, about 1 8 inches in the smaller. They were divided into two kinds — plain, consisting simply of grass-work, with fine rolled paths between ; and composed, which were laid out with trees, box, and palisades of pleached work. In the latter case fountains or statues were sometimes placed in the middle of the green. The French further included in their classi- fication of grass-work " ascents " of various elaborate forms, which were generally sub- divided into two heads — the glacis which was a gentle slope, and the talus which was steep. Besides the above varieties, theatres and banks of different designs were formed in grass-work. Grass theatres were more common on the continent than in England. The author of the Theorie et Pratique talks of a " salle avec des gradins servant d'amphitheatre et de theatre pour jouer la comedie." In the gardens of the Prince Bishops of Wurzburg there was a famous amphitheatre formed of banks of turf, with clipped hedges for scenery. This practice of designing banks and recesses of grass-work might well be revived on simpler lines, provided always that geometrical forms are kept to — such as plain curves or rectangular shapes — and that there is none of that vague amor- 142 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vi. c phous sloping in which the landscape gardener delights. There is no reason why a lawn- tennis court should not be laid out on the lines of a bowling-green, with regular sloped grass banks at the sides ; and at one end a semicircular bay in grass might be formed, or what the older writers used to call a cabinet — that is, a regular recess with a well-trimmed pole-hedge. There are great possibilities about a lawn-tennis court properly handled — that is, if the scale given by the dimensions of the court itself are sedulously adhered to, and the features introduced are kept sufficiently large and simple. To make the court a really valuable part of the garden it is not enough to lay out a sufficient expanse of grass, which loses itself at the earliest opportunity in shrubs and flower-beds. The court should be taken as a definite problem, and designed as an integral part of the garden. And this applies to all grass-work. The mistake of the land- scapist is that he considers grass only as a background, not as a very beautiful thing in itself. Grass-work ought to be designed with reference to its own particular beauty. The turf of an English garden is probably the most perfect in the world, certainly it is far more beautiful than any to be found on the continent, and even the French admitted this two hundred years ago. It is wilfully throwing away a most valuable means of delight to treat VI. GRASS-WORK 143 grass -work is a mere affair of hap-hazard convenience. Here, perhaps, most of all, in order to get out of grass-work its full possi- bility of beauty, is necessary that decent order and restraint, that fine sobriety of taste that once reigned paramount over all the arts of design in England. CHAPTER VII FISH-PONDS, PLEACHING, ARBOURS, GALLERIES, HEDGES, PALISADES, GROVES The double purpose of a garden — for use and pleasure — has been forgotten in landscape gardening. You either get a kitchen garden useful but ugly, or a pleasure garden not useful, and only redeemed from ugliness by the floTvers themselves. The charm of the older garden is in the combination, of the two, or rather the way in which grounds and water laid out, not solely for their beauty, were made beautiful by their reasonable order. The old fish-pond with its regular grass banks is a charming thing in itself, yet this was at first as much a matter of necessity as the poultry-house or the dove-cote. Here lived the lazy carp, the pike, the perch, the bream, the tench, and other fish that might VII. FISH-PONDS, PLEACHING, ARBOURS 145 be wanted for the table. A slow stream of running water kept the fish-pond fresh, and at one end was formed a " stew," or small tank, to keep the fish that were netted. Markham describes the formation of a fish-pond in some detail {Cheape and Good Husbandrie, book ii., London 1638). First drain your ground and bring all the water to one head or main reservoir. From this you form your canal to supply the pond. The sides of the canal are to be formed with piles, 6 feet long and 6 inches square, of oak, ash, or elm, to be driven in in rows and the earth well rammed behind them. You then form the sides of your pond with sloping banks covered with large sods of plot grass laid close and pinned down with small stakes. " On one side you are to stake down Bavens or faggots of brushwood for the fish to spawn in, and some sods piled up for the comfort of the eels, and if you stick sharp stakes slantwise by every side of the pond that will keep thieves from robbing them." To explain his advice, Markham gives " a platform for ponds" (reproduced in the text), which shows a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of a square with a triangular extension on the entrance side. The walks between the canals and ponds were to be planted with willows or fruit-trees. Markham also describes another method of dealing with marshy ground, by which an orchard might be combined with a ^mwwwaiwfi Fig. 28. — From Markham's Cheape and Good Hushandrk, G. The Gate. P. The Ponds. D. The Ditch and quickset hedge. I. The Peniles. W. The Walkes. M. The Mount. ■B. The Bridge. | Br. The Brooke. S. The Springhead. The Valkes about the pond may be planted with fruit-trees or willows. vii. FISH-PONDS, PLEACHING, ARBOURS 147 fish-pond. You dig a series of ditches 16 feet broad and 9 deep, 12 feet apart in parallel rows, the banks between to be 7 feet high and 12 feet wide, planted with osier at the sides and fruit- trees on the banks — " Thus you will get a sort of maze and pleasant fish-ponds." Perhaps the gardens at Theobalds described by Hentzner (see chap, ii.) were laid out in this manner." Six feet of water and 2 feet for the banks are given by Markham as maximum depths. The size would be arbitrary. Lawson, who had a keener eye for beauty than Markham, advises that the pond should be large enough for swans and other water birds. The fish- pond gradually lost its practical character and developed into the' ornamental water ; it became part of the scheme of the gaMen design, grass banks and all. There is a good instance of this in the Brickwall gardens, where the fish-pond, which measures 32 paces by 12 wide, occupies one of the two main plots. There is another instance at Pendell House, near Bletchingley, where the fish-pond divides the lawn from the flower gardens beyond. At Sydenham, in •Devonshire, there is an oblong piece of water in the middle of the lawn with a circular basin for a fountain in the centre. The grass banks required a good 'deal of attention to keep them trim, and this led to the substitution of brick or stone sides instead 0/ grass in more important work ; and when the influence of Le Notre vii. FISH-PONDS, PLEACHING, ARBOURS 149 extended to England, the fish-pond as a fish- pond disappeared in the vast sheets of water which formed an essential feature in his system of design. Great canals and basins, as at Wrest, in Bedfordshire, took its place, and the transi- tion from this to the artificial lakes of the Fig. 30. landscape gardener was easy. The great canal at Wrest measures about 250 paces by 50, with transepts at the north end and a large pavilion at the south. There is also at Wrest a pond called "the Ladies' Canal," with grass banks measuring about 90 paces by 40. This is surrounded by a broad grass verge and yew- hedges 20 feet high, with a statue at the west I50 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. end. The fish-pond at Penshurst measures about 35 paces by 21.0 ; it has brick side walls, a grass verge 10.9 wide, and yew-hedges 7.6 high on all four sides. The water pieces at Melbourne are rather elaborate, one, with a fountain in the centre, is laid out as an oblong with circular bays on the sides. The main piece is formed by an oblong 72 paces by 43, with a half-quatrefoil extension on the farther side. This is surrounded by grass verges on either side of a gravel path, and yew-hedges with recesses for seats and statues. Opposite the centre, on the farther side, is the famous wrought-iron garden-house. The Long Canal at Hampton Court, measuring 150 feet by 3.500, and formed in the reign of Charles II., is probably the largest instance of the kind in England." " Pleaching " is probably the best abused of the many iniquities of the formal garden. The man of " nature " says it is unnatural, and it gives an occasion for cheap ridicule too obvious to be resisted. But those who have a weakness for the vicious old practice are in good company. The Romans used to do all sorts of things in pleaching, and so did everybody else down to the end of the seventeenth century and later. The word " pleach " means the trimming of the small boughs and foliage of trees or bushes to bring them to a regular shape, and, of course, only certain species will VII. FISH-PONDS, PLEACHING, ARBOURS 151 submit to this treatment — such as lime, horn- beam, yew, box, holly, white-thorn, and privet, kinds that are " humble and tonsile," as an old writer calls them. Pleaching must be dis- tinguished from another old word still in use, " plashing," which refers to the half-cutting of the larger branches and bending them down to form a hedge. Markham explains " plashing " to be "a half- cutting or dividing of the quicke growth almost to the outward barke, and then laying it orderly in a sloape manner, as you see a cunning hedger lay a dead hedge, and then with the smaller and more plyant branches to wreathe and bind in the tops." Pleaching was employed to form mazes, arbours or bowers, green walks, colonnades, and hedgerows, besides the infinite variety of cut-work in yew and box. Mazes were formed all through the seven- teenth century. The one at Hatfield is a perfect instance. The maze at Hampton Court is another familiar example. This appears to have been planted in the time of William III., and it is not probable that many were laid out after that date. The bower or green arbour existed in the medieval garden, but probably in a somewhat artless form. The earliest account of arbours is found in The Gardener s Labyrinth ; the writer classifies arbours as upright or winding. The up- right arbour was simply a lean-to, the winding or arch arbour an independent arbour standing by itself At the end of the seventeenth century 152 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. a further distinction was made between bowers and arbours ; a bower was always long and arched, an arbour was either round or square, domed over at the top. The older arbours were formed with poles of juniper or willow framed square and bound with osiers, and were covered with roses trimmed and trained to the framing, or with jessamine, rosemary, juniper, or cypress (Markham) ; or with bryony, cucumber and gourd. " Mountaine " adds that as arbour^ of roses required a great deal of attention " the most number in England plant vines for the lesser travaile to nurse and spread over the upright and square Herbers, framed with quarters and poles reaching abreadth." These arbours fell into disuse for four excellent reasons, given by Worlidge : " ( i ) they quickly fall out of repair ; (2) the seats are damp ; (3) the rain drips longer here than anywhere else ; (4) they are draughty, and on a hot day it is pleasanter to sit under a lime-tree than to be hoodwinked in an arbour." Besides the arbours there were the long covered walks and galleries, arched over at the top, with a solid hedge on the outer side, and openings or " windows properly made to- wards the garden, wherebye they might the more fully view and have delight of the whole beauty of the garden." Bacon contemplated a green gallery such as this to run round the sides of his outer garden. There were some remarkable instances in the old gardens at Wilton. The 154 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. views published by Isaac de Caux show long green galleries arched over with pavilions at the ends and in the centre ; and some less elaborate galleries are shown in Logan's views of Pem- broke, Oxford. The prints reproduced from The Gardener's Labyrinth and The Hortus Floridus of Crispin de Pass show their general character. The long yew walk at Melbourne is really a green gallery without the openings. It was planted early in the eighteenth century. Its length from the top to the fountain is 120 paces, its width inside 12 feet. The yew has grown into an impenetrable vault of branches overhead, so thick that it is proof against an ordinary shower of rain. The green gallery was not an importation of the sixteenth century , but a direct survivalijf the medieval garden . In "The Romance of the Rose" there are several beautiful illustrations of these green galleries, formed of light poles framed square, as described in The Gardener s Labyrinth, and overgrpwn with roses, red and white. They continued in use till the end of the seventeenth century, when, as was the case with nearly all that was beautiful in the formal garden, they were elaborated out of all reason, and only continued in use in quiet country gardens where the master loved his garden, and liked the old ways better than the new. In The Retired Gard'ner, by London and Wise, full directions are given for the formation of green galleries and porticoes and colonnades of 156 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. cut -work. The galleries should be 8 to 10 feet broad and 12 or 15 feet high, the outer side solid, the inner side open as a gallery, with pillars formed by the trunks of the trees, set 4 feet apart, with a low hedge 3 feet high between each trunk. These were generally formed of lime or hornbeam. " Natural arbours " as opposed to arbours of trellis-work were formed of elm, lime, and hornbeam in the Same way. A rough framework of wood or iron seems to have been used in the first instance to start the trees on the required lines. After they were fairly set, the trees were brought into shape by wreathing the boughs together and constant clipping. Hedges, of course, could only be formed by pleaching. The older gardeners preferred a close-grown hedge, white-thorn or privet, to any other form of fencing round a garden. It was pleasant to look on, and more difficult to get over than any wall. The Gardener's Labyrinth says " the most commendable enclosure for every garden plot is a quick -set hedge, made with Brambles and white -thorn." Lawson advises a double ditch and a hedge of thorn, though " it will hardly availe you to make any fence for your orchard, if you be a niggard of your fruite." These hedges were planted in two or three rows, kept behind shelter for three or four years, and clipped at every possible oppor- tunity ; about 6 or 7 feet was a usual height. Fig. 33. 158 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. Worlidge, who was nothing if not practical, again classifies the reasons for preferring white- thorn for hedges : (i) it grows quickest, and is most easily trimmed ; (2) it is stronger and most durable ; (3) it is of a delicate colour ; (4) it puts out its leaves the earliest in spring. =5 f s; \ ^ r J .. 1 H T" /Hi % I v^ -ii ~ i" j^ y ' ^ Ifi IbrJ. ^^ -^lit^-" —^^^-"-^ Fig. 34. — Hedge, from Markham's Country Farm. Markham allows five to seven years for a quick- set of white-thorn. In The Country Farm he gives some designs for the shaping of hedges. The quarters of his garden are to be fenced with "fine curious hedges made battlement -wise in sundrie forms according to invention, or carrying the proportions of Pyllasters, flowers, shapes of beasts, birds, creeping things, shippes, trees and VII. GALLERIES, HEDGES 159 such-like." A framework is to be formed of square framing bound with osiers and wire. At the foot of this in the spring or autumn " you shall set white-thorn, eglantine, and sweet-briar mixt together, and as they shall shoot and grow up, so you shall wind and pleach them within the lattice - work, making them grow and cover the same," and always trimming to the shape required. In about two or three years, he says, you will get an excellent, strong hedge. Evelyn in his Sylva (Hawthorn) criticises Markham's directions as to plashing, and gives very full particulars as to the proper method of forming a quick-set hedge. In Herefordshire he notices that a crab-tree stock was invariably planted every 20 feet apart in the quick-set. For many years after Markham wrote the custom of cutting the tops of hedges into fanciful shapes continued in use. There is a good example in yew at Cleeve Prior manor- house, in Warwickshire, and the doves at Risley, mentioned before. Evelyn claims that he was the first to bring yew into fashion, not only for hedges, but also as " a succedaneum to cypress, whether in hedges or pyramids, cones, spires, bowls, or what other shapes." Buttresses and ramps, little square towers, finials of various forms, archways and canopies were cut in yew as late as the beginning of this century in out-of- the-way places and in the smaller gardens. The well-known instances at Arley, in Cheshire, and i6o THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. Penshurst are not more than twenty -five years old. Besides white-thorn, privet, and yew, the sweet-briar, pyracantha, and holly were commonly used for hedges. Holly was the special favourite of Evelyn, because of its power of defence and the sheen of its leaves. At Sayes Court he had a holly-hedge 400 feet long, 9 feet high, and 5 feet thick. This hedge was his special pride till Peter the Great came to live at Deptford, and formed a habit of amusing himself after his labours in shipbuilding by charging the hedge in a wheel -barrow. Evelyn says he had seen hedges of holly 20 feet high " kept upright, and the gilded sort budded low, and in two or three places one above another, shorn and fashioned into columns and pilasters, architectonially shaped and at due distance, than which nothing can possibly be more pleasant, the berry adorning the intercolumniations with scarlet festoons and encarpa." The worst possible bush for a hedge is the laurel. It starts with great promise, and everything goes well for two or three years, after which it gets thin and straggly underneath, and becomes shabbier and shabbier every year. The only chance with it is to cut it and clip it without remorse. In some old- fashioned gardens, where fruit-trees and flowers are allowed to grow together, beautiful hedges are formed by apple-trees grown as espaliers.^ ^ In Mr. Robinson's Parks and Gardens of Paris there is n useful description of the French methods of forming trellis-hedges of pear and apple and other fruit-trees# VII. PALISADES, GROVES i6i Palisades or pole -hedges were high hedges formed of trees — such as lime, elm, or horn- beam. These were usually of great length and height, and the point to be aimed at was to keep them entirely smooth and even, making, as it were, a great wall or green tapestry, " all the beauty of which consists in being well filled up from the very bottom, of no great thickness and handsomely clipped on both sides as per- pendicularly as possible." Where the palisades had to be very high the stems of the trees were kept bare of branches, and the intervals up to the level of the lowest branch planted with yew or box trimmed to form a solid screen. At Brickwall there is a palisade of lime-trees along one side of the garden. The branches are trained and trimmed to form a continuous curtain, starting about lo feet from the ground, and behind the trees is an old red brick wall up to the level of the boughs. A palisade of this sort is delightful in colour, and easily kept in shape if properly pleached ; and in this respect it is more satisfactory than very great walls of yew, which are apt to lose their symmetry and become obese and corpulent as soon as they have reached maturity. Evelyn particularly commends the hornbeam. " Being planted in small fosses or trenches, at half-a- foot interval and in the single row, it makes the noblest and stateliest hedge for long walks in gardens or parks . . . because it grows M 1 62 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vn. tall and so sturdy as not to be wronged by the winds ; besides it will furnish to the very foot of the s'tem, and flourishes with a glossy and polished verdure, which is exceedingly delight- ful." He mentions the long walk of the Luxembourg and " the close walk with that perplext canopy which lately covered the seat in his Majesty's garden at Hampton Court," and the hedges at New Park, as instances of hornbeam hedges. At the end of the seventeenth century much money was spent in forming palisades of different architectural forms. Twenty thousand crowns were spent in work of this sort at the gardens of the Hotel de Conde. London and Wise are minute in their directions. The arcades were to be formed of elm, lime, or hornbeam — elm for preference. The elms were to be planted in a straight line 8 to lo feet apart. Elms about 6 feet high and "as thick as your arm" (the two dimensions do not quite agree) were to be used. In the second year after planting you began to form the columns by selecting the likeliest boughs and binding them with osiers to a wooden post, and cutting off the rest. The arches were formed by binding hoops of wood to the posts and training the boughs to these as before. In the spandrels will be left a tuft of foliage, which you trim to the shape of an apple or any other form you please. Each column will be about 1 6 feet high — 6 feet of plain stem, and lo feet vii. PALISADES, GROVES 163 for the column itself formed of the boughs and foliage. James's translation gives twice the breadth as the right proportion for the height of the arches, and adds that a hedge breast- high should be made between the columns, and niches and recesses for statues and seats formed in the palisade. The palisade was to be double — that is, planted in two rows with a grass walk in between, and between each column there was to be a border set with double gillyflowers, roses, or Indian pinks ; on the outer side there was to be a dwarf hedge of hornbeam 1 8 inches high. London and Wise describe other varieties of pleached work which sound suspicious. For instance, along the sides of walks or the borders of parterres elms might be planted and trimmed into round-headed standards, the stem quite bare for 6 feet or so from the ground, and the branches clipped into balls of foliage ; or horn- beam might be planted round the elm, and cut low to form the base, or balls of rose-trees formed between the standards. These could only look well if used with delicate tact and the greatest reticence ; unfortunately these were just the qualities in which the gardeners of the early eighteenth century were wanting. But a lilac walk formed with standards 1 2 feet apart, with stems 10 feet high, and a palisade of hornbeam in between, sounds better ; and London and Wise mention a hedge of pyracantha to go round a narrow place enclosed with walls, which 164 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. in colour and form might be quite beautiful. At regular intervals cypress -trees were to be planted, with stems kept bare for 8 or 10 feet, and the spaces between were to be filled up with a hedge of pyracantha cut close against the wall. At the end of the seventeenth century the laying out of groves was regularly included in garden design. In the earlier Renaissance garden little was done in this direction except in the way of mazes ; a space outside the garden was often reserved for a wilderness such as Bacon describes, in which design was purposely abandoned. But the growing tendency was to reduce the garden to a system, till it reached its climax in the school of Le Notre, and the bosquet or grove of regular form took the place of the wilderness. Chapter vi. of The Theory and Practice of Gardening is entirely devoted to " woods and groves." " Their most usual forms are the star, the direct cross, the Saint Andrew's Cross, and goose-foot.^ They nevertheless admit of the following designs, as cloisters, quincunxes. Bowling-greens, Halls, cabinets, circular and square compartments, halls for comedy, covered halls, natural and artificial arbours, fountains, isles, cascades, water galleries, green galleries, etc." These groves were to be laid out with walks from 12 to 24 feet wide, separated from ^ The "goose-foot," patte-d'ote^ consisted of three avenues radiating from a small semicircle. The three great avenues at Hampton Court, vith the semicircular garden, form a goose-foot. 1 66 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vii. the trees by palisades. The trees in these groves were not supposed to exceed 40 feet in height or thereabouts, and they might either have underwood or not, as desired. Where there was no underwood, trees — such as limes, elms, or horse-chestnuts — were to be planted in regular lines at right angles to each other, the stems kept bare for 10 feet and the trees set out about 15 feet apart. The ground underneath was either fine gravelled, or laid with grass. In the latter case a circle about 4 feet across, without grass, was to be left round each tree. There are good examples of groves laid out to a regular design at Wrest and Melbourne, fcut the best instances of this sort of work arc to be found in France. In many towns and villages on the banks of the Seine between Paris and Rouen, and elsewhere in France, there are charming groves of lime-trees, symmetrically planted and regularly clipped. The groves at Versailles are still much as Le Notre left them. The great walks of lime-trees, close trimmed for 20 feet or more, and the halls cleared in the groves and set out with statues are very beautiful on a sunny day ; but the rest of the work is dull, and there can be no doubt that this kind of work does require great space and great expense to be seen to perfection. In The Theory and Practice of Gardening forty-four different designs are given for the largest groves. PALISADES, GROVES 167 Some are simple enough, but most of them are absurdly elaborate, more particularly a design of a labyrinth (like a Catherine wheel) with cabinets and fountains, which it would be quite impossible to carry out. Over-elaboration, incapacity for self-suppression, these were the vices which wrecked the formal garden, and opened the way for every kind of imposture. With evident complacency, London and Wise remarked that it is certain " the Industry of Gard'ners was never equal to what it is now." It is also certain that this misapplied industry was foredoomed to failure, and that the disappearance of the formal garden was its inevitable result. CHAPTER VIII Garden Architecture BRIDGES, GATEHOUSES, GATEWAYS, GATES, WALLS, BALUSTRADES, STAIRS Since the disappearance of the formal garden, the necessity of scholarly design for garden buildings has been forgotten, and the result is seen in buildings and details, which are not simple and childlike, but wholly pretentious and bad. This is not due solely to the enterprise of the landscape gardener. The fault lies quite as much with his employer, who, VIII. GARDEN ARCHITECTURE 169 perhaps, prefers the cast-iron finials and meagre woodwork of his conservatory, and possibly takes pleasure in the grotesque impossibilities of his rustic summer-house, but who on any showing, has no idea that art has to be taken as a whole, that it must penetrate everywhere, that it is not enough to have a well-designed house, if everything inside it is vulgar ; or a house complete, with a meaningless garden ; or a fair house and garden, with no thought given to its walls and gateways. Till the end of the eighteenth century a tradition of good taste existed in England — a tradition not confined to any one class, but shown not less in the sampler of the village school than in the architecture of the great lord's house. It might be said to have lingered on into this century in sleepy country towns. Behind the lawyer's house, with its white sash-windows and delicate brick work, there may still survive some delightful garden bright with old-fashioned flowers against the red brick wall, and a broad stretch of velvety turf set off by ample paths of gravel, and at one corner, perhaps, a dainty summer- house of brick, with marble floor and panelled sides ; and all so quiet and sober, stamped with a refinement which was once traditional, but now seems a special gift of heaven. It would be impossible here to give more than a general sketch of the details of garden architecture. The field is a wide one, and I70 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vm. could only be fully handled in relation to the art of the time. Such a subject as the gate- house, for instance, would take its place in a specific treatise on architecture. Where the house, as was often the case, was surrounded by water, the enclosure was reached by a bridge, sometimes of wood, more often of brick or stone. There is only one point to be noticed in regard to these bridges, and that is, that as much thought and architectural knowledge was devoted to their details as was spent on those of the house. No such ragged and rickety struc- ture as " the rustic bridge " would have been tolerated in the formal garden. On the other hand they were sometimes unnecessarily sumptu- ous. The Palladian bridge at Wilton is a fine piece of academical design, but it is rather unreasonable in England. When the land- scapists were destroying the formal garden they preserved some of its worst features, among them the Palladian bridge, which was repeated literally both at Stowe and Prior Park. The gatehouse in the sixteenth centur y usually formed part of "tEe block of house build- ings, and was marked by rising one storey above the rest. The gateway of a college quadrangle is a familiar instance. When the fore cou rt developed into a well def ined courtyard the ga.ieafay was de tacKe d from tlTF""lious"e7 but s till conti nued to^ be a building o f two or more storpys, with wing walls to the right and left GARDEN ARCHITECTURE 171 joining the side walls of the court. Charlcote, in Warwickshire, and Burton Agnes, near Bridlington, in Yorkshire, are good examples in brick and stone. At Lanhydrock, in Corn- THR -pAT.TAHIAn TORIDCaE : ^WILTOW I^WILTSHIRE,: Fig. 36. wall, there is a two-storey gatehouse in stone, which shows a charming mixture of late Gothic and Renaissance details. This gatehouse stands at the end of a fine avenue of sycarffore^~37 paces wide, with counter avenues of beeches 1 6 paces wide. Another remarkable gatehouse 172 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vin. is that of Westwood, in Worcestershire, shown in Kip's views. This is probably Elizabethan. The gateway is set back between two projecting bays with stone gables. The wall between is of brick, the upper part of open strapwork in stone. Over the centre of the building rises a square stage of oak framing, slated, for a clock or bell. In Atkyns's Gloucestershire (p. 340) a view is given of Shipton Moyne, showing a gatehouse flanked with turrets, and a room over the arch, apparently reached by steps from a raised terrace running round the fore court. There is a somewhat simi-lar in- stance at Bolsover Castle. The gateway stands in a polygonal wall of sufficient thickness to admit of a walk along the top all round the court, this walk being reached from a small door from the first floor of the keep. The gateway of Hardwick House, with its open strapwork, is a very ugly instance of a gate- house to the fore court in one storey. The gate- way was sometimes flanked on either hand by small one-storey buildings for a porter's lodge, as at Ribston, in Yorkshire ; or the gateway was simply an archway in the courtyard wall, with a cornice and gable or pediment over. There is a curious instance at Bradshaw Hall, in Derbyshire, 1620. With t)}e. in.trndiirtini; i of long avenues a further chanp;e was made. The gatehouse in front of the house interfered with the view of the facade. The fore_CQnrt vin. GARDEN ARCHITECTURE 173 was accordingly en closed with wrought iro n ra ilings on a low w all, and elaborate entrance g ates betwe en piers of mason ry or bricTcwork. and the g atehouse was shifted to the other end of the avenu e. There are many instances of these gatehouses or lodges dating from the eighteenth century. In all cases their details follow those of the architecture of the house. The later instances of the eighteenth century degenerated into various versions of little Greek temples, rather ridiculous to look at, and quite unsuit- able for the lodge-keepers to live in. The best position for the gatehouse would be high level ground overlooking the park. The one place where it should never stand is on the side of a hill, for the simple reason that while the gates are being opened carts and carriages have to stand on a slope. There is an instance of this at Prior Park, near Bath. The main entran ce gateway was usually pl aced in the centre"of the fore, c ourt, o pposit e the f ront do-o r. though this position was varied to suit particular cases. In smaller houses the gateway stood at the end of a broad flagged path leading up to the house, and visitors had to alight in the road outside. These gateways were sometimes arched, and sometimes consisted simply of stone or brick piers. There is a good instance in the town of Wilton of a small gateway with a circular arch, flanked by pilasters, with a circular pediment over and 17+ THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND vm. stone brackets at the sides. ■ On either side of the gateway are wing walls completing the semicircle. There are instances at Bradford-on- Avon and many . other places. They are usually quiet and simple in detail and excel- lently built, for the masonry of the eighteenth century is probably the best that ever was done in England. The piers on either side of the gates show every variety of design. The most familiar instance is the square pier of brick or stone with moulded base and top, and a great stone cannon ball. These seem to have come into use in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and to have lasted to the beginning of this. There are many instances in London. Those at Ashburnham House are well known. There is a late but very well-designed example (about 1780) in the Euston Road, at the entrance to Maple's timber-yard. At Eyam Hall, Derbyshire, the piers are of stone, divided by bands into three carved panels. At Risley the piers are of brick for a height of 8 feet 6 inches ; above this is a stone pedestal 2 feet 9 inches high, with cannon-ball finials. The piers are 9 feet apart, and the wing walls with the gate form half an ellipse 38.0 long. There are fine examples at Swarkestone, in Derbyshire, and Mapperton, in Somersetshire. Besides the cannon balls, urns of all sorts were placed on the top of the piers, as at Okeover, in Staffordshire, and vm. GARDEN ARCHITECTURE 175 the great brick piers in Lincoln's Inn Fields, attributed to Inigo Jones ; or obelisks, as at Canons Ashby and Hardwick ; or eagles, as in the Gray's Inn gardens ; or heraldic beasts or devices, as at Montacute and Canons Ashby ; or trophies of arms, as in the gate- way at Hampton Court. The piers themselves were varied indefinitely. Those at Groom- FiG. 37. bridge Place have an additional pier on the outer side, with a niche for a seat. At Scalby, near Scarborough, the piers consist of two small towers, about 3 feet in diameter, with cornices and stone domed roof. The most difficult of all to design satisfactorily is the plain pier and cannon ball. Besides the main gateway, there were the gate- ways in garden-walls_, leading from the fruit to" 176 THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND viii. the flower garden, or from one part of the garden to another, or from the paddock to the garden. Markham says " the false gate (other- wise called the back or field-gate) in that side Fig. 38. toward your medow, made for your going in or out alone, shall be set out and garnished with two chevrons, set upon one maine timber and no more, and foure or five battlements." At Coley Hall, near Halifax, there is a garden gate- way of stone not unlike Markham's description. GARDEN ARCHITECTURE -^11 It is dated 1649, ^^d there are good seventeenth- century examples at Orwalle, in North Hants, and Stibbington Hall, in Huntingdonshire. The stepped battlement form was commonly used for brick and stone gateways ; there is a curious seven- teenth - century example on the terrace at Risley. The gateway stands at the head of a flight of steps leading to the terrace. In the centre is a square- headed door flanked by niches on both sides, and piece of wall with Fig. 39. above is a blank a stepped gable, with ;W-.