GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



Speaking of Blenheim in his " Observations on Modern Gardens,'* 

 Wheatley says : " The sides are open lawn. On that farthest 

 from the house formerly stood the palace of Henry II., celebrated 

 in many an ancient ditty as ' Fair Rosamund's Bower.' ' A little 

 clear stream, which rises there, is by the country people still called 

 " Fair Rosamund's Well." Since at Blenheim the remains of a 

 Roman Villa were found, it is possible that the trees in Henry's 

 " Parke" were survivors of those that had been in the garden of 

 that Villa ; and if so, Blenheim may claim to be the most ancient, 

 as it is one of the finest examples of landscape gardening, in the 

 country. 



The first English writer on Gardens was one Alexander Mark- 

 ham, foster-brother of Richard Coeur de Lion who became a 

 professor in the University of Paris, and towards the end of his 

 life, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Cirencester. 



In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a poem 

 entitled, " John the Gardener," composed in the fourteenth 

 century, that gives practical advice upon sowing and grafting ; 

 and a fifteenth century manuscript still extant, contains a treatise 

 bearing the wordy title : 



' For a man to know in which time of the year it is best for 

 a man to plant trees, also to make a tree bear all manner of fruit 

 of divers colours and odours, with many other things." The 

 reader is advised to give due attention to the signs of the Zodiac, 

 for in that age astrology the forerunner of astronomy con- 

 cerned with the supposed influence of the stars on terrestrial 

 affairs, determined the times to sow and to graft ; and the efforts 

 of the alchemist to transmute inferior metal into gold were 

 rivalled by the attempt of the horticulturist to produce hybrid 

 varieties of flowers and fruit peaches with the kernels of nuts, 

 stoneless cherries, pomegranates from peaches, and so forth. 



Chaucer is a rich mine in which to dig for information on the 

 subject of medieval gardens. He took many of his plots from 

 Boccaccio. ' The Black Death," the most devastating of the 

 five visitations of the plague in the fourteenth century, of which 

 the Italian poet, in the introduction to the ** Decameron " gives a 

 vivid and terrible description, swept through Europe reaching 

 Florence, where sixty thousand persons are said to have died, in 

 1348, when Chaucer was eight years old. Boccaccio's lavish praises 



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