THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



purple cowslips and double cowslips, primrose double and single, the 

 violet nothing behind the best for smelling sweetly, and a thousand 

 more will provoke your contente, and all these by the skill of your 

 Gardener so comely and orderly placed in your borders and 

 squares." 



All this illustrates the spirit in which the art of gardening was 

 carried on by the men who were to a large extent free from the 

 Italian influence, or who had the acuteness to perceive how the 

 earlier traditions could be used as a kind of stock upon which the 

 Italian methods could be grafted ; and such books as Lawson's are 

 the more interesting because they were written by a gardener who, 

 as he says in the Preface to his " New Garden and Orchard," was 

 able to draw upon the knowledge he had acquired by " the labours 

 of forty-eight years." In working out the sequence of events in the 

 history of garden-making, the writings of Markham and Lawson are 

 of special value, for they not only throw light upon the way in 

 which the surroundings of most country houses of any pretension 

 were treated at the end of the sixteenth century, and for a large part 

 of the seventeenth, but they also provide many hints of what must 

 have been the ordinary practice at an earlier period before the novel 

 artificialities of the Renaissance manner began to unsettle the beliefs 

 based upon the mediaeval tradition. It would certainly appear that 

 even at the beginning of the seventeenth century such gardens as 

 those at the Palaces of Nonsuch and Hampton Court, or the 

 " perfectest figure of a garden " at Moor Park, were as exceptional 

 in style as they were in extent, and represented little enough the 

 general practice. 



Of seventeenth-century gardening in the traditional manner, but on 

 a large scale, probably no better example could be quoted than that 

 at Melton. For the laying out of this garden the Earl of Pembroke 

 secured the services of the German architect, Isaac de Caux, of 

 whose work an ample record exists, for he issued a series of 

 engravings of the place, with a detailed explanation of its particular 

 characteristics : " This Garden, within the enclosure of the new 

 wall, is a thowsand foote long and about foure hundred in breadthe, 

 divided in its length into three long squares or parallelograms, the 

 first of which divisions next the building heth foure Platts, embroy- 

 dered ; in the midst of which are foure fountaynes with statues of 

 marble in their midle, and on the sides of those Platts are the Platts 

 of flowers, and beyond them is the little Terrass rased for the more 

 advantage of beholding those Platts, this for the first division. In 

 the second are two Groves or woods all with divers walkes, and 



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