daring ; but these recklessly defiant escapes from rule only add to the 

 charm of the place, presenting a fresh surprise at every turn. The play 

 oflight and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped ever- 

 greens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow, cold, 

 almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising brilliancy 

 of golden-green — often all bright gold-green when the young shoots 

 are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of its many 

 wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities of form, 

 offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light, whose play 

 upon them is infinitely varied. Then the beholder, passing on and 

 looking back, sees the whole thing coloured and lighted anew. This 

 quantity of Yew and Box clipped into an endless variety of fantastic 

 forms has often been criticised as childish. Would that all gardens were 

 childish in so happy a way ! Is not the joy and perfectly innocent 

 delight that the true lover of flowers feels in a good garden in itself akin 

 to childishness, and is not a fine old English garden such as this, with 

 its numberless incidents that stir and gratify the imagination, and its 

 abundance of sweet and beautiful flowers, just the one that can give that 

 happiness in the greatest degree f Does not the oldest of our legends, 

 so closely bound up with our youngest apprehension of religious teaching, 

 tell us of the earliest of our race of whom we have any record or even 

 tradition, living happily in a garden in a state of childish innocence ? 

 Why should a garden not be childish ? — perhaps when it truly deserves 

 such a term it is the highest praise it could possibly have ! 



However this may be the fact remains that those who own this garden 

 of many wonders, and watch and tend it with unceasing love and 

 reverence, and others who have had the happiness of working in it for 

 many days together, find it a place that never wearies, but only continues 

 day by day to disclose new beauties and new delights. Doubtless it is 

 a garden that cannot be fairly judged from a hasty glance or a few hours' 

 visit. Like many of the places and things that we call inanimate — 

 though to one who knows and loves a garden nothing is more vitally 

 living — such a place has its moods and can frown upon an unsympathetic 

 beholder. 



The garden is filled with many Roses and well-grown hardy plants ; 

 64 



