THE CHARM OF GARDENS 



were in use in the Seventeenth Century, and the means 

 employed to grow and preserve them. 



Then, as now, there was a danger of over cultivation of 

 certain plants and flowers, so that a man might have 

 more pride in the number and curiosity of his flowers, 

 than in the beauty and colour of them. It is a certain 

 fault in modern gardeners that they do not study the 

 grouping and massing of colours, but do, more generally, 

 take pride in over-large specimens, great collections, 

 and rare varieties. But this age and that are times of 

 collecting, of connoisseurship, ages that produce us great 

 art of their own but have an extraordinary knowledge of 

 the arts and devices of the past. Not that I would 

 decry the friendly competitions of this and that man to 

 grow rare rock plants, or bloom exotics the one against 

 another, but I do most certainly prefer a rivalry in pro- 

 ducing beautiful effects of colour ; and love better to see 

 a great mass of Roses growing free than to see one poor 

 tree twisted into the semblance of a flowering parasol as 

 men now use in many of the small climbing Roses. 



To the end that gardeners and lovers of gardens may 

 know how those past gardeners treated their fruits and 

 flowers, I give the whole of Evelyn's "Gard'ners 

 Calendar," than which no more complete account of 

 gardens of that time exists. 



It would be as well to note, before arriving at our 

 Seventeenth Century Calendar, how the art of gardening 

 had grown in England after the time of the Romans. 



From the time that every sign of the Roman occupa- 

 tion had been wiped out to the beginning of the thir- 

 teenth century, gardens as we know them to-day did not 

 exist. The first attempts at gardens within castle walls 

 were little plots of herbs and shrubs with a few trees of 

 Costard Apples. It appears that all those plants and 

 flowers the Romans cultivated had been lost, and that 



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