SCOTTISH GARDENS 



on upper Tweedside, which is a cold district, ill- 

 suited for the orchard industry. Yet have apple- 

 trees long been grown there, for Merlin the Wizard 

 apostrophises one of them in a poem preserved in 

 the Black Book of Carmarthen. After his flight 

 from the field of Ardderyd (Arthuret, near Carlisle), 

 where the Pagan cause was finally overthrown by 

 the Christian leader Rydderch Hael, A.D. 573, Merlin 

 took up his abode in the Caledonian Forest, and, 

 after living there for "ten years and forty/' was 

 buried at Drummelzier, where Powsail Burn joins 

 the Tweed. The following passage occurs in his 

 lament for the lost cause. 



" Sweet apple tree, growing by the river ! 

 Whereof the keeper shall not eat of the fruit ; 

 Before I lost my wits I used to be round its stem 

 With a fair, playful maid, matchless in slender shape." 1 



But it is a fatal thing to begin prosing about 

 the memories, historic and prehistoric, of this 

 Border country. Merlin is not the only wizard who 

 has cast his spell upon it, for we are here upon 

 the outskirts of Ettrick Forest, whereof Washington 

 Irving, nursed among the pathless forests and broad 

 rivers of the New World, received so chill an impres- 

 sion when he visited Walter Scott at Abbotsford. 



" I gazed about me," he wrote, " for a time with mute 

 surprise. I beheld a mere succession of grey, waving hills, 

 line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous 

 in their aspect, and so destitute of trees that one could almost 



Vivien of the legend and of Tennyson's idyll. 

 142 



