AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 



Obviously the reference is to a fashion prevalent at the time, 

 of planting in beds and plots, a fashion that was not set in the 

 Garden of Eden, and therefore not commendable. 



Such, as far as I can gather, was " the happy garden state " 

 of our ancestors up to the eighteenth century. Old-world gardens, 

 in many respects unchanged, may yet be found " in and round 

 London," to one or two of which I shall later introduce you. 

 They are touched, it is true, by " decay's defacing finger," but 

 they are still flowery, shady, and sunshiny too. In them old- 

 fashioned flowers the cabbage rose, the sweet william, the stock, 

 the monkshood, the snapdragon, and the pansy flourish ; and in 

 spite of dividing walks of springy turf, and borders of ancient box, 

 elbow each other in their eagerness to invade the territory of the 

 turnip and the cabbage. There, in the "months of April, May and 

 June, the lilac and the hawthorn intermingle boughs and blossoms, 

 and, in August and September, peaches slowly ripen on sunny 

 walls, whilst apples grow rosy in other quarters. 



In such a garden, reminiscent of the time when orchard and 

 garden were one, apple-trees, pear-trees, and plum-trees, hoary with 

 age, mossy with long inertia (in some sense an illustration of the 

 proverb that "rolling stones gather no moss"), mount guard over 

 the vegetable kingdom, dropping windfalls for the children to pick 

 up. They stretch gnarled and twisted arms benevolently over the 

 rosemary and southernwood, the lavender and the rose-bushes, as 

 though in mute benediction on the little ones playing, or on the 

 lovers seated, beneath. 



The names of four distinguished Englishmen, who were experi- 

 mental and practical gardeners, stand out conspicuously in the 

 history of horticulture in this country during the years intervening 

 between the beginning of the seventeenth and the latter half of 

 the eighteenth century. They are Francis Bacon Lord St. Albans, 

 Sir William Temple, John Evelyn the diarist, and Horace Walpole. 



The ideas of the aristocratic Bacon on the subject of pleasure- 

 grounds are on a grandiose scale. In his famous essay, " Of 

 Gardens," he says that the ideal garden should comprise not less 

 than thirty acres of ground, and he tells us that he is speaking only 

 of those that are " indeed Prince-like." 



Dying in 1626, in the second year of the reign of the unhappy 

 Charles I., it is probable that, owing to the vast ness of his 



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