ARLEY 



Throughout the length and breadth of England it would be hard to find 

 borders of hardy flowers handsomer or in any way better done than those 

 at Arley in Cheshire, The house, an old one, was much enlarged by the 

 late Mr. R. E. Egerton-Warburton, and the making of the gardens, now 

 come to their young maturity, was the happy work of many years of his 

 life. Here we see the spirit of the old Italian gardening, in no way 

 slavishly imitated, but wholesomely assimilated and sanely interpreted to 

 fit the needs of the best kind of English garden of the formal type, as to 

 its general plan and structure. It is easy to see in the picture how 

 happily mated are formality and freedom ; the former in the garden's 

 comfortable walls of living greenery with their own appropriate orna- 

 ments, and the latter in the grandly grown borders of hardy flowers. 



The subject of the picture is the main feature in the garden plan. A 

 path some fifteen feet wide, with grassy verges of ample width, and deep 

 borders of hardy flowers. What is shown is about one fourth of the 

 whole length. At the back of the right-hand border is the high old wall 

 of the kitchen garden ; on the left, as grand a wall of yew, ten feet high 

 and five feet thick, its straight line pleasantly broken and varied by shaped 

 buttresses of clipped yew, whose forms take that distinct light and shade, 

 and strong variations of solidity of green colouring, that make the surfaces 

 of our clipped English yew so valuable a ground-work for masses of 

 brilliant flowers. 



The same yew buttresses are against the wall on the right, placed 

 symmetrically with the ones opposite. Near the end, as shown in 

 the picture, the last pair of buttresses come forward the whole width 



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