FLOWER GARDEN AND PLEASURE GROUND HOUSES, ETC. 371 



use materials of the estate or country. Ivy and living creepers may 

 help to protect the sides of airy sheds. Larch comes in well where Oak 

 is not to be spared, and Larch shingling for the roof might be used, 

 as is commonly done in farm-houses in Northern Europe and America. 

 Little shelters for mowing machines, tools and the like can be made 

 with wood covered with Larch bark, as at Coolhurst, and a very 

 pretty effect they have, besides being less troublesome to make 

 than the heather or thatched roofs, especially in districts where 

 the good thatcher is getting rare. The chip roof, also, of the wooded 

 country around London is an excellent one, lasting for half a century 

 or so if well made, but the men who 

 made it so well are now less and 

 less easy to meet with. And on 

 the whole the best roof for any 

 structure that has to last is of tiles 

 of good colour : tiles made and 

 tested in the locality being often 

 the best. 



Fountains in Gardens. — In 

 this moist climate of ours water 

 needs to be used with great discre- 

 tion. Above all things it must flow 

 and not stagnate. Bacon, who said 

 so many things about gardens well, 

 summed up the case with his usual 

 felicity: — "For fountains, they are a 

 great beauty and refreshment ; but 

 pools mar all." No doubt we can 

 all of us recall some pool of great 

 beauty, some moat with little broken 



reflections that made almost all the charm of the garden wherein it 

 lay, but as a general rule Bacon is right. 



As nothing is drearier than a dry fountain except the exasperat- 

 ing trickle of one that refuses to be drowned out by the continuous 

 drip of the eaves, it is better to place your fountain in a part of the 

 garden which you are only likely to visit on a fine day, and if possible 

 it should be set where its tossing spray will catch the sunbeams while 

 you repose in the cool shade ; then the supply of water may be as it 

 should — unfailing. Fountains on such an extensive scale as those 

 of Versailles or Chatsworth are only to be excused, when, as at Caserta, 

 they run day and night from one year's end to the other. It is only 

 in such great places too that large and monumental fountains, basin 

 above basin, adorned with sculpture and connected by cascades, have 

 any fitness, and even where they are fit they are apt, here in England, 



B B 2 



to Bishop s Garden (Chichester). 



