AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 



events of seventy years we glean something of his interest in 

 gardens and gardening. 



In laying out his estate at Deptford he tells us that he first 

 began with the " oval garden." When he went there it was 

 merely a rough field of one hundred acres, " with scarcely a hedge 

 to it," but he covered it with groves, walks, and plantations. 

 When, in 1694, he went to live at Wotton, with his brother (to 

 whose property he succeeded five years later), he let Sayes 

 Court to Admiral Benbow, on condition that he kept it up, 

 which he failed to do. In 1698 Benbow sublet it to the Czar 

 Peter the Great, at that time visiting the dockyard at Deptford. 

 He proved " a right nasty tenant." So great was the injury done 

 to the property by him and his retinue, that Benbow, who was 

 responsible to Evelyn, called in Sir Christopher Wren with London, 

 the King's gardener, as his assistant to estimate the damage, 

 which was assessed at 350 9s. 6d. Irreparable injury was done 

 to trees and shrubs ; and no wonder, for one of Czar Peter's 

 refined amusements was to be wheeled in a barrow through the 

 garden hedges, and among the things specified in the inventory 

 as having been damaged, were three wheelbarrows ! 



Evelyn translated a work called " The French Gardener," 

 which has much to do with pickling, preserving, and drying fruits ; 

 and Hazlitt says that " Jam, as an ingredient of our culinary 

 economy, does not date much farther back than the middle of 

 the seventeenth century," when Evelyn published his adaptation 

 from the French. 



But Evelyn accomplished a greater feat than popularizing- 

 preserves. 



In Tudor times it had been complained that men " were more 

 studious to cut down trees than to plant them," and in the reign 

 of Charles II. the scarcity of timber began to make itself severely 

 felt. What was to be done ? Wood was wanted for ships, and 

 none was forthcoming. 



The Navy Board turned to the newly-founded Royal Society 



for help ; and Evelyn, as the member most competent to advise 



on the subject, took the matter up, and in 1664 published his 



' Sylva," by which, as the King afterwards told him, he had 



induced many people to mend their broken estates, and the woods 



' which the greedy rebels had wasted and made havoc of." 



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