HISTORICAL EPILOGUE 



Zll 



practice. He has left us in Hortulan literature the * Kalendarium 

 Hortense,' a ' Discourse on Sallets/ and the scheme of a vast 

 gardening work called ' Elysium Brittanicum,' which he did not 

 live to complete. At Wotton in Surrey (still belonging to his 

 descendant) he unfortunately yielded to the taste of the time 

 and removed a mountain to fill up the Moat, and here also he 

 contrived a Grotto which he calls a ' Pausilippo,' after the famous 

 one near Naples. He constructed the Oval Garden at Sayes 

 Court near Deptford, where the 'Czar of Muscovy' (Peter the 

 Great) amused himself in 1698 by being trundled in a wheel- 

 barrow through the holly-hedges and over the box borders ; for 

 which piece of fun Sir Christopher Wren (the Architect) and 

 London (the Gardener) assessed the damages of a three months' 

 tenancy at ;j^i5o. 



Old Sir Thomas Browne,^ the famous Norwich Physician, treats 

 in his ' Garden of Cyrus ' of the ' Quincuncial Lozenge of the 

 Ancients,' but inasmuch as the Quincunx had been the recognised 

 method of planting trees (to form a grove in a square of five 

 repeated over and over again, so that look which way you will, 

 equal or parallel alleys are seen), he did not add much to our 

 knowledge of garden design. 



To this age too belongs the Prince of Garden Poets, Andrew 

 Marvel, and they are to be envied who have yet to breathe the 

 fragrance of his garden verse : 



Annihilating all that's made 

 To a green thought in a green shade. ^ 



A passing mention is deserved by Ralph Austen, a student of 

 Magdalen College, Oxford, where he spent his time in gardening 

 and raising fruit trees, and wrote the ' Spiritual use of an Orchard ' ; 

 by John Rea, a practical gardener of forty years experience who 

 laid out Lord Gerard's garden at Gerard's Bromley, and was the 

 author of * a rude Draught of a Rustick Garden ' called ' Flora, 

 Ceres and Pomona' (1665), wherein he states that he has seen 

 many gardens of the new model in the hands of unskilful persons, 

 with good walls, walks, and grass-plots, but in the most essential 

 ^ See ante pp. 94-6. - ante p. 240. 



