First English Work on Gardening. 1 5 



useful as well as ornamental and decorative, 

 by consisting of kitchen herbs. It might 

 have been judged, from the low growth of 

 the latter, that the structure was of a different 

 kind from that with which we have grown up 

 acquainted ; but Hill clearly says that the 

 object was "to sport there at times/' so that 

 the rosemary and other plants must have 

 been trained in some particular manner, to 

 carry out our idea of such a thing. 



The taste for the capricious and fantastic 

 in the disposition of the garden and orna- 

 mental grounds was probably imbibed by 

 noble or rich Englishmen, who brought back 

 with them a desire to imitate fashions which 

 they had seen abroad. The mazes which 

 Hill introduces into his earlier book were 

 elaborated by him in one called the Gar- 

 dener 's Labyrinth, which he did not live to 

 complete, and which was published in 1577 

 by Henry Dethicke. But the designs in 

 this volume appear to have been borders 

 devised in various forms, and not the piece 

 of intricacy for persons to disport them- 

 selves, and the title-page explicitly declares 



