220 COLLEGE GARDENS 



and a certain amount of flower. The tree shown in drawings 

 of the west front of the College between the two towers 

 seems to have been a Birch. On the other side of the 

 Lodgings, near the Library, are a Plane and a Birch, planted 

 in 1 80 1 by Henry Philpotts, afterwards Bishop of Exeter. 

 The former girths 15 ft. i in. ; the latter, 5 ft. 3 in. A 

 Chinese Crab Apple, Pyrus spectabilis* by the New Buildings 

 measures 4 ft. 4 in. 



Near the kitchen, by an untidy rockery, is a tree which I 

 have always believed to be Cerasus padus, the Bird Cherry, 

 but it may be an allied species. Trunk-girth, 3 ft. 10 in. 



Before the end of the seventeenth century Celia Fiennes 

 mentions "a very fine gravel walk, two or 3 may walke abreast, 

 & Rows of trees on either side, & this is round a water 

 w ch makes it very pleasant" so pleasant, that to keep it from 

 being flooded it was raised about 1701, and was so much 

 approved that Wood wrote the following eulogy on the College : 



" Whose Grove & Gardens, enclosed with an embattled 

 wall by the Founder, are emulous with the gardens of Hippo- 

 litus Cardinal d'Este, so much famoused and commended by 

 Franciscus Scholtus in his Itinerary of Italy : Go into the 

 Water-walks, and at some times of the year you will find 

 them as delectable as the banks of Eurotas, which were 

 shaded with bay trees, and where Apollo himself was wont 

 to walk & sing his lays. And of the Rivers here, that 

 pleasantly and with a murmuring noise wind and turn, may 

 in a manner be spoken, that which the people of Angoulesme 

 in France were wont to say of their river Touvre, that ' it is 

 covered over and chequered with swans, paved & floured 

 with troutes, and hemmed & bordered with crevisses.' Such 

 pleasant meanders also shadowed with the trees were there, 



* Loudon has placed it on record that a P. spectabilis grew in the 

 Botanic Garden to a height of 25 ft. in thirty years : the diameter of trunk 

 was 10 in. and of head 20 ft. It would have been planted about 1806, 

 and our tree must be of about the same age. 



