26 GARDENS PAST AND PRESENT 



over the land. It was then that the era of build- 

 ing stately houses set in, as Hardwick and Audley 

 End and many another ancestral Elizabethan hall 

 bears witness; and the amendment filtered down 

 by slow degrees to the masses. The wealthy mer- 

 chants began to set up their luxurious town man- 

 sions with spacious grounds about them; the 

 smaller landowners and country squires had their 

 comfortable manor houses, the farmers their roomy 

 homesteads; and very gradually the improvement 

 reached to the humble dwellings of the ploughman 

 and the hind. Round the great houses picturesque 

 surroundings naturally grew up gardens of a style 

 borrowed from Italy, with fountains and statuary 

 and stately terraces. Avenues of exotic trees were 

 planted, not so much for the present enjoyment 

 of the planter as for posterity. The squire of the 

 country manor must follow in the wake of the lord 

 of the great house, and lay out the sheltered bowl- 

 ing green within its wall of yew the pleached 

 alley for shade in sultry weather. The farmer and 

 even the thrifty labourer, taking example, must 

 needs have, besides the rood or two of kailyard 

 which belonged to their different degrees, their 

 knots of flowers and clipped peacock or green arch- 

 way over the cottage gate. Beneath it all was the 

 innate love of flowers which lies hidden away in 

 the nature of every true-born Briton, be he gentle 

 or simple, kindled, it may be, by the soft gleam 

 of primroses in the mossy woodland, the sweet 

 breath of violets, the wreaths of June roses or 

 trailing clematis in the autumn hedgerow those 

 wildings that are never more lovely than in that 



