those especially of tall stature making a fine effect. The Rose garden 

 has White Pinks in its outer beds. Immediately beyond the garden's 

 bounds is wild ground of a beautiful character. The river Kent, a rock- 

 strewn stream with steep wooded banks, flows within fifty yards of the 

 house. The contrast is a great and a delightful one. Wild parkland and 

 untamed river without ; and within the walls ordered restraint ; then 

 again, the quiet of the wide bowling-green, with its dark clipped hedges, 

 and beyond it a long, tree-shaded walk. 



Precious, indeed, are the few remaining gardens that have anything 

 of the character of this wonderful one of Levens ; gardens that above all 

 others show somewhat of the actual feeling and temperament of our 

 ancestors. They show personal discrimination combining happily with 

 common-sense needs ; walls and masses of yew and box to make shelter 

 from the violence of wind, and yet to admit the welcome sunlight ; so 

 to provide the best conditions in the inner spaces for the growing 

 of lovely flowers. Then the shaping of some of the yews into strange 

 forms, shows perhaps the whimsical humour of some one of a line 

 of owners, preserved, with careful painstaking, by his descendants. 



A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the 

 minds of several of such possessors — men who have not only thankfully 

 paced its green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have 

 held it in that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure 

 to be some living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, 

 or its beauty. The original design may have become in some degree 

 lost, but unless the doings of the several owners have been in the way 

 of destruction or radical alteration, or something of obvious folly or 

 bad taste, the garden will have gained in a remarkable degree that 

 quality of human interest that is not easy to define but that is clearly 

 perceptible, not only to a trained critic but to any one who has know- 

 ledge of its most vital needs and sympathy with its worthiest expression. 

 This precious utterance is not confined to this or to any one special 

 kind of gardening, but may pervade and illuminate almost any one 

 of the many ways in which men find their pleasure and delight in 

 ordering the sheltered seclusion of their home grounds, and enjoying 

 the varied beauty of tree and bush and flower. 



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