GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



flat effect was aimed at. " Knots and parterres," we are told, 

 " became so elaborate that the small tortured spaces between 

 the box patternings were less and less homes for plants, more and 

 more filled with coloured sand." Topiary work that is, clipping 

 and training trees and shrubs into fantastic shapes now came 

 into fashion, but as yet was not carried to excess, and the seven- 

 teenth-century garden, no doubt, had much beauty. J. D. Sped- 

 ding says : " There is about the Jacobean Garden an air of 

 scholarlism and courtliness, a flavour of dreamland and Arcadia 

 and Italy a touch of the Archaic and classical yet the thing is 

 saved from utter artificiality by our English love of outdoor 

 life " and also, I suggest, by that independence of restraint that 

 is innate in the British character. And ever we find the English 

 gardener, except when by force of circumstances he came very 

 much under foreign influences, indisposed towards formalism ; 

 though of coiirse the ideal garden holds the balance between nature 

 and art. 



John Evelyn, author of the famous diary, did much more than 

 Bacon, with all his theories and experiments, to advance horti- 

 culture. Whilst Bacon schemed and talked, Evelyn was prac- 

 tical. He was born in 1620 at Dorking, of parents who occupied 

 a good position, and he was educated at Balliol. A devoted 

 Royalist, he yet seems to have placed prudence before patriotism, 

 as he understood it, for, lest he and his brother should be exposed 

 to ruin by their espousal of the King's cause without any com- 

 pensating advantage to His Majesty, he joined the King's army 

 only to leave it at the end of three days. After travelling on the 

 Continent for four years, he returned to England, and settled 

 in 1652, at Sayes Court, near Deptford, where he was able to indulge 

 his horticultural tastes. But Evelyn was a courtier as well as a 

 gardener, and after the Restoration we find him much at White- 

 hall, and occupying several official posts. And he was from the 

 beginning a prominent member of the newly-founded Royal 

 Society. 



His diary not published until a hundred and twelve years after 

 his death, and of which Sir Walter Scott said he " had never seen so 

 rich a mine" is no less illuminating in the light it throws on 

 the history of his day, than that of his lively contemporary, Pepys. 

 From time to time in its pages pages that deal with the important 



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