THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING. 163 



always be facility for getting real seclusion, so much 

 needed now-a-days ; indeed, the provision of 

 places of retreat has always been a note of an 

 English garden. The love of retirement, almost as 

 much as a taste for trees and flowers, has dictated 

 its shapes. Hence the *cedar-walks, the bower, 

 the avenue, the maze, the alley, the wilderness, that 

 were familiar, and almost the invariable features of 

 an old English pleasaunce, " hidden happily and 

 shielded safe." 



This seclusion can be got by judicious screen- 

 ing of parts, by shrubberies, or avenues of 

 hazel, or yew, or sweet-scented bay, with perhaps 

 clusters of lilies and hollyhocks, or dwarf Alpine 

 plants and trailers between. And in all this the true 

 gardener will have a thought for the birds. " No 

 modern exotic evergreens," says Jefferies, " ever 

 attract our English birds like the true old English 

 trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to 

 build ; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with 

 vacant draughty spaces underneath, they detest, 

 avoiding them as much as possible. The common 

 hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall 

 contain three times as many nests, and be visited by 

 five times as many birds as the foreign evergreens, 

 so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the 

 first old-fashioned frost." 



* One of the finest and weirdest cedar-walks that I have ever 

 met with is that at Harwell, near Owslebury in Hampshire. Here 

 you realize the wizardry of green gloom and sense of perfect seclusion. 

 It was here that Henry VIII. courted one of his too willing wives. 



M 2 



