134 



THE MOUSE AND ITS EQUIPMENT. 



ON GARDEN DESIGN GENERALLY. 



Beginnings of Gardening in England Italian Influences Fountains Grottoes Stairways Terraces 

 Parterres Clipped Hedges Statues and Vases in Stone and Lead Need for Restraint in 



Garden Ornaments. 



A MONG all the older of the important gardens that are so numerous throughout the British 

 A Islands, there is but little that remains to us in the way of garden ornament that is of an earlier 

 / \ date than the first three decades of the sixteenth century. It may well be supposed that 

 / \ there were ornamental gardens attached to the villas built in Britain by her Roman conquerors, 

 for the great gardens of Rome and its environment, profusely ornamented with sculpture and 

 architectural detail, with many benutiful ways of using water, and ordered alleys of clipped ever 

 greens, were still maintained in their 

 original splendour. But this we can 

 only conjecture, for there remains no 

 existing proof or written record. \Ye 

 hear of a pleasure garden made in the 

 thirteenth century by King Henry III. 

 at \Yoodstock, but it is an isolated 

 fact in the history of horticulture. 

 Manuscripts of the fifteenth century 

 show small walled gardens with arbours, 

 fountains and turfed seats, with trellises 

 and covered alleys, where suitable 

 shrubs and trees were trained over 

 a wooden framework. It must be 

 remembered that before the time of 

 King Henry VIII. the great houses 

 were still places of defence, closely 

 encompassed by moat or wall, and that 

 the spaces within were small, and, 

 therefore, necessarily given to herbs 

 and plants for use in the kitchen and 

 pharmacy. Gardens for pleasure and 

 beauty were thus almost unknown. 

 But when the country became more 

 settled, and a private house was no 

 longer a fortress, and the windows of 

 the main rooms, that formerly might 

 only look into an enclosed court, could 

 now be large and wide and could 

 look abroad without fear into the 

 open country with this wholesome 

 and comfortable expansion of the 

 house came also the widening of the 

 hitherto cramped garden spaces. 



Gardens for pleasure might now 

 be made, and every house had its 

 roomy bowling green. Then, with 

 increasing enjoyment of garden delights 

 came the desire for garden ornaments. 

 Sundials had long been in use, but 

 now they were to be for ornament as 

 well as utility, placed as centres and 

 at other salient points of garden 

 schemes. No fewer than sixteen dials 

 150. RAPE OF THE SABiNES AT PAIN S HILL. were made for the King s new garden 



