VARIOUS FLOWER GARDENS. 



an opportunity for growing a great number of hardy flowers which 

 bloom in the autumn. These formed picture vistas, of which the effec^ 

 is very often better than a flower garden of the usual type. But, more 

 than this, the excellent plan was followed here by the late Lady 

 Henry Grosvenor of having what I do not think any garden can be 

 right without, namely, a " square " or reserve garden in which things 

 are grown well without reference to effect. It was a large square 

 of the kitchen garden thrown into 4-feet beds, with little beaten 

 alleys between, in which many thousand Carnations were grown 

 in simple masses. One sees at once how much more beauty and 

 variety can be got in such ways than where all the effort goes to 

 help one scheme for effect in front of one's windows. What is the 

 secret of beauty in such a garden, and what the lesson to be learnt 

 from it? It is that no one plan will give us a garden beautiful for any 

 length of time even in the fine season, as any one way is so liable to 

 failure from the weather or other causes ; that the main source of 

 success is to have various ways with flowers, as there were at Bulwick, 

 Hardy plants in beds and borders apart from the flower garden 

 proper (that, too, being pretty) are the source of the charms of this 

 garden — the variety of situation, the variety of plants, but of hand- 

 some, well-chosen and well-grown plants, and even variety of level in 

 the various gardens, such as occurs at Bulwick, are all good aids, and 

 the nearness of an interesting kitchen garden with sheltering walls is a 

 source of beauty and variety. 



EVERSLEY. — In the late Charles Kingsley's rectory garden at 

 Eversley, we get to see a modest, and simple as charming, type of 

 garden. The walls and borders are full of flowers, while the Grass 

 clothes the central space. When Canon Kingsley became rector of 

 Eversley, in 1844, he found the garden at the rectory in as unsatis- 

 factory a state as was, in other respects, the rest of his parish ; but 

 its capabilities he used to the utmost. On the sloping lawn between 

 the house and the road stood, and still stands, a noble group of three 

 Scotch Firs, planted about the time that James I. — who was just then 

 building the grand old house of Bramshill, hard by, as a hunting box 

 for Prince Henry — planted the Scotch Firs in Bramshill Park, and 

 the clumps on Hartford Bridge Flats and Elvetham Mount. Most of 

 the garden consisted then of a line of ponds from the glebe fields, past 

 the house, down to the large pond behind the garden and churchyard. 

 The rector at once became his own landscape gardener, and the ponds 

 were drained. Plane trees, which threatened in every high gale to 

 fall on the south end of the house, were cut down, and masses of 

 shrubs were planted to keep out the cold draughts, which even on 

 summer evenings streamed down from the bogs on the edge of 

 Hartford Bridge Flats. What had been a wretched chicken yard in 



