Gardens for Small Country Houses. 



CHAPTER I. MILLMEAD, BRAMLEY, SURREY. 



Site of Ancient Buildings Shapeless Ground Terraced in Successive Levels Steps 



and Dry-walling Summer-houses. 



SOME old timbered cottages, dating from Jacobean times, standing on a piece of 

 ground in a lane leading westward out of Bramley, were condemned and 

 demolished at the end of the nineteenth century. The ground remained 

 unused for some years, and the part next to the lane, overgrown with docks and nettles, 

 had become a place where neighbouring cottagers found it convenient to throw their 

 household debris. . In 1904 an old former inhabitant went over it, and found that 

 from halfway down it looked over the wooded grounds of the old home and the half- 

 distant hilly woodland that had been the scene of childish primrose-picking rambles, 

 while the foot of the plot adjoined the green mill meadow, in view of some fine, near 

 trees and the rushing millstream, and was within the soothing sound of the working 

 water-mill. It was soon resolved that the land should be bought, and a house built 

 upon it that should not only be worthy of the pretty site but that should also be the 

 best small house in the whole neighbourhood, both for architectural merit and for 



FIG. I. THE FIRST SUMMER-HOUSE. POINT OF VIEW "A" ON GENERAL PLAN (FIG. 4) AND 



PLANTING PLAN (FIG. 5). 



