Book I. GARDENING IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 



6<> 



Sect. I. British Gardening as an Art of Design and Taste. 



315. Of British gardening, as an art of taste, nothing is known for the first thousand 

 years of our aera. With the eleventh century commences some notices as to England ; 

 with the fifteenth, a few indications as to Scotland ; and with the seventeenth century 

 some hints as to the state of our art in Ireland. 



Subsect. 1 . Gardening in England, as an Art of Design and Taste. 



316. Roman landscape-gardeiiing was lost in England when that people abandoned 

 Britain to the Saxons in the beginning of the fifth century ; but as it had revived in 

 France under Charlemagne, it would probably be re-introduced into England with the 

 Norman Conqueror, in the end of the eleventh century. 



317. Henry I. (1100), the third king after William the Conqueror, had, according to 

 Henry of Huntingdon [History, lib. 7.), a park (habitationem ferarum) at Woodstock; 

 and it may not be too much to conjecture, that this park was the same which had sur- 

 rounded the magnificent Roman villa, whose extensive ruins, occupying nearly six acres, 

 have been recently dug up on the Duke of Marlborough's estates in that neighbourhood. 

 Blenheim, the first residence in Britain, or perhaps in Europe, in respect to general grandeur, 

 may in this view be considered as the most interesting in point of its relation to antiquity. 



318. In the time of Henry II. (1154), Fitzsteven, it is observed by Daines Barrington 

 states, that the citizens of London had gardens to their villas, " large, beautiful, and 

 planted with trees." In De Cerceau's Architecture, published in the time of Henry III. 

 there is scarcely a ground-plot not laid out as a parterre or a labyrinth. 



319. During Henry V.'s. reign, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, King James I. 

 of Scotland was a prisoner in Windsor castle for several years. In the poem written by 

 that monarch he gives the following account of a royal garden there : — 



"Now was there maide fast by the touris wall "So thick the bewis and the leves grene 

 A garden faire, and in the corneris set Beschudit all the alleyes that there were, 



Ane herbere grene, with wandis long and small And myddis every herbere might be sene 

 Railit about, and so with treeis set The scharp grene swete jenepere, 



Was all the place, and hawthorn hedges knet, Growing so fair with branches here and there, 



That lyfe was non, walkyng there for bye That as it semyt to a lyfe without, 



That myght within scarce any wight espye. The bewis spred the herbere all about" 



The Quair, by King James I. of Scotland, published by Lord Woodhouselee. 

 i 



320. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Leland, in his Itinerary, states, that at 

 " Wresehill Castelle, in Yorkshire, the gardeins within the mote, and the orchardes 

 without, were exceeding fair. And yn the orchardes, were mountes, opere topiaris, 

 writhen about with degrees like cokil shelles, to com to the top without payn." [Itinerary, 

 &c. p. 60.) Such a mount still exists at the castle inn at Marlborough, not ascended 

 by steps or degrees, but by a winding path. It is covered with ancient yew-trees, no 

 longer opere topiaris. Leland also mentions the gardens at Morli, in Derbyshire, and 

 some others of less note in the northern counties. 



321. During the reign of Henry VII, Holingshed informs us, that large parks or 

 circumscribed forests of several miles in circumference were common. Their number in 

 Kent and Essex alone amounted to upwards of a hundred, (p. 204. ) The Earl of Nor- 

 thumberland had in Northumberland, Cumberland, and Yorkshire, twenty-one parks, and 

 5771 head of red and fallow deer. He had also parks in Sussex, and other southern 

 counties. These parks were formed more from necessity than luxury ; tenants for land 

 being then not so readily obtained as in later times. 



322. During the reign of Henry VIII. the royal gardens of Nonsuch were laid out 

 and planted. " At Nonsuche," says Hentzner, " there were groves ornamented with trellis- 

 work, cabinets of verdure, and walks embowered with trees, with columns and pyramids 

 of marble. Two fountains that do spout water, the one round the other like a pyramid, 

 on which are perched all over, small birds that spout water out of their bills." These 

 gardens are stated, in a survey taken in die year 1650, above a century after Henry's 

 death, to have been cut and divided into several alleys, compartments, and rounds, set about 

 with thorn-hedges. On the north side was a kitchen-garden, very commodious, and 

 surrounded with a wall fourteen feet high. On the west was a wilderness severed from 

 the little park by a hedge, the whole containing ten acres. In the privy-gardens were 

 pyramids, fountains, and basins of marble, one of which is " set round with six lilac-trees, 

 which trees bear no fruit, but only a very pleasant smell." In the privy-gardens were, 

 besides the lilacs, 144 fruit-trees, two yews, and one juniper. In the kitchen-garden 

 were seventy-two fruit-trees and one lime-tree. Lastly, before the palace, was a neat 

 handsome bowling-green, surrounded with a balustrade of freestone. " In this garden," 

 observes Daines Barrington, u we find many such ornaments of old English gardening, 

 as prevailed till the modern taste was introduced by Kent." 



F 3 



