NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 



design to a place where an elaborate and extensive scheme of garden- 

 making was not required. Mr. Mawson has done so much ambitious 

 work, so many things on a large scale in which he has had to grapple 

 with difficulties of a complicated kind, that this comparatively small 

 villa garden must have seemed to him quite an easy undertaking. But 

 he has not, because it was easy, dealt with it in any careless mood ; it 

 shows, indeed, a kind of exquisite delicacy in treatment and is finished 

 in all its details with delightful precision and it has stamped upon it 

 that individuality of manner which distinguishes all his productions. 

 The entrance gate with its broad steps and rough stone walls is 

 excellently planned ; the terrace in front of the house with its beds 

 of flowers, and, at the end, a little pergola, has exactly the right touch 

 of homely simplicity ; and the steps which lead from this terrace to 

 the tennis lawn below are given a rustic character that is wholly 

 appropriate and entirely free from any touch of affectation. In this 

 garden, indeed, is revealed the secret of the success of Mr. Mawson's 

 art his capacity to recognise what are the special needs of the 

 subject presented to him and his power of adapting himself to the 

 demands made upon him by circumstances. 



Smithills (Plates CXVIIL, CXIX., and CXX.), which is just outside 

 Bolton, is one of the largest and most picturesque of the old English 

 half-timbered houses, and its gabled front, quaintly irregular and 

 partly veiled with creeping plants, has a quite unusual beauty. Such 

 a house requires an appropriate setting and this has been provided by 

 the planning of gardens which are perfectly in keeping with the 

 building to which they are attached. The lawn in front, with its 

 terrace wall and the long flower bed which borders the path to which 

 the steps from the terrace lead, is admirably spaced, and its proportions 

 are excellently related to the height and length of the house. Its 

 simplicity of design is not the least of its merits, for a more elaborate 

 arrangement would have clashed to some extent with the architectural 

 details of the building and would have produced a certain confusion of 

 effect. In the other parts of the gardens the same air of congruity 

 has been maintained ; they are orderly and restful and never compli- 

 cated by unnecessary features, and they are full of flowering plants of 

 the kinds that fit best into such surrounding?. 



Another beautiful half-timbered house is Speke Hall (Plates CXXI. 

 to CXXIV.), which, as an inscription over the entrance porch 

 implies, was built in the latter part of the sixteenth century, 

 when it replaced an earlier stone house which stood on the same 

 site. The porch, which is on the north side, is approached by a 

 bridge twenty-five yards long over what was formerly a moat spanned 



xxxiii 



