VARIOUS FLOWER GARDENS. 57 



desire for growing many more plants than are hardy in our country. 

 In this garden Major Gaisford has gathered together a host of rare 

 and beautiful trees, shrubs, and plants which, favoured by a genial 

 climate, give to the garden a distinct aspect. There is here an entire 

 absence of that conventional gardening which lays down hard, 

 geometric patterns where we should see the free and graceful forms 

 of shrubs and flowers. The house is nearly hidden by climbing plants, 

 and a grand old Ivy-embowered Walnut standing on an airy lawn. 



BULWICK. Rambling about Northamptonshire, and delighted 

 with its beautiful old houses, many of them, unfortunately, as bare of 

 flower-gardening as a deserted ship, it was pleasant to come to a real 

 garden at Bulwick, full of Carnations and many open-air flowers 

 arranged in various pretty ways, even the house being full of large 

 basins of Carnations some of them of one self-coloured kind a rare 

 pleasure. The flower garden was not one of those places which 

 astonish us by a showy display, but modest at first sight as regards 

 flower-gardening in immediate relation to the house, and the chief 

 charm of the place was rather in various little side gardens and long 

 and pretty borders backed with Holly and other hedges, and giving 

 an opportunity for growing a great number of hardy flowers which 

 bloom in the autumn. These formed picture vistas, of which the effect 

 is very often better than a flower garden of the usual type. But, more 

 than this, the excellent plan was followed here by the late Lady 

 Henry Grosvenor of having what I do not think any garden can be 

 right without, namely, a " square " or reserve garden in which things 

 are grown well without reference to effect. It was a large square 

 of the kitchen garden thrown into 4-feet beds, with little beaten 

 alleys between, in which many thousand Carnations were grown 

 in simple masses. One sees at once how much more beauty and 

 variety can be got in such ways than where all the effort goes to 

 help one scheme for effect in front of one's windows. What is the 

 secret of beauty in such a garden, and what the lesson to be learnt 

 from it ? It is that no one plan will give us a garden beautiful for any 

 length of time even in the fine season, as any one way is so liable to 

 failure from the weather or other causes ; that the main source of 

 success is to have various ways with flowers, as there were at Bulwick. 

 Hardy plants in beds and borders apart from the flower garden 

 proper (that, too, being pretty) are the source of the charms of this 

 garden the variety of situation, the variety of plants, but of hand- 

 some, well-chosen and well-grown plants, and even variety of level in 

 the various gardens, such as occurs at Bulwick, are all good aids, and 

 the nearness of an interesting kitchen garden with sheltering walls is a 

 source of beauty and variety. 



EVERSLEY. In the late Charles Kingsley's rectory garden at 



