352 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



Other Elizabethans besides Bacon had imaginative and pro- 

 phetic glimpses of the modern or landscape garden the worthy 

 Ambassador (sent to lie abroad for the good of his country) and 

 Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton noted ' a certain contrariety 

 between building and gardening ; for as fabricks should be regular, 

 so gardens should be irregular, or at least cast into a very wild 

 regularity' 1 and Sir Philip Sidney in his 'Arcadia' brings hi\ 

 hero to a 'well-arrayed ground,' that was 'neither field, garden, 

 nor orchard ; or rather it was both field, garden and orchard.' 



Here is Sidney depicted by old Isaac Oliver, the miniaturist, 

 reposing in the Garden at Penshurst, which he has immortalised, 

 with its ' pleached ' gallery in the distance ; famous once, as 

 Evelyn says in his ' Diary,' for the noble Conversation which 

 was wont to meet in its Gardens ; such conversation, as we 

 know from Clarendon in more troubled days, the ' flowing ' and 

 gracious Falkland attracted round him in his garden-retreat at 

 Great Tew, near Oxford, a 'College situated in a purer Air; 

 so that his house was a University in a less volume.' 



And now, in the words of Sidney, let us turn to our 'sweet 

 enemy, France,' whose hands for more than a century were 

 destined to sway the sceptre of garden sovereignty. 



1632, when Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, gave five acres on the Cherwell, 

 with Jacob Bobart from Brunswick as Superintendent, whose descendants (says 

 London) are still in Oxford. In 1673 the Apothecaries founded theirs at 

 Chelsea, of which Miller, author of the Gardener's Dictionary, was the most 

 famous Director during half a century (see Field and Semple's ' Memoirs '). 

 Tradescant's garden at Lambeth was famous, and his collection left to Ashmole 

 was the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum : but except the catalogue, 

 Tradescant has left no writings (see G. W. Johnson and Loudon). 



1 The following interesting marginal note is from a copy of Wotton's 

 'Elements of Architecture' by Christopher Wren, Chaplain to Charles I., 

 Dean of Windsor and father of the Architect : ' For disposing the current of 

 a river to a mightie length in a little space I invented the serpentine, a form 

 admirably conveying the current in circular and yet contrary motions upon one 

 and the same level, with walks and retirements betweene, to the advantage of 

 all purposes, either of gardenings, plantings or banquetings. In brief it is to 

 reduce the current of a mile's length into the compass of an orchard ' (see 

 Gardener's Magazine, vol. iii. p. 480). 



