GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
Speaking of Blenheim in his ‘‘ Observations on Modern Gardens,” 
Wheatley says: ‘The sides are open lawn. On that farthest 
from the house formerly stood the palace of Henry I., celebrated 
in many an ancient ditty as ‘ Fair Rosamund’s Bower.’” A little 
clear stream, which rises there, is by the country people still called 
‘‘Fair Rosamund’s Well.”’ Since at Blenheim the remains of a 
Roman Villa were found, it is possible that the trees in Henry’s 
‘‘ Parke” were survivors of those that had been in the garden of 
that Villa; and if so, Blenheim may claim to be the most ancient, 
as it is one of the finest examples of landscape gardening, in the 
country. 
The first English writer on Gardens was one Alexander Mark- 
ham, foster-brother of Richard Coeur de Lion—who became a 
professor in the University of Paris, and towards the end of his 
life, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Cirencester. 
In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a poem 
entitled, ‘‘ John the Gardener,” composed in the fourteenth 
century, that gives practical advice upon sowing and grafting ; 
and a fifteenth century manuscript still extant, contains a treatise 
bearing the wordy title : 
‘* For a man to know in which time of the year it is best for 
a man to plant trees, also to make a tree bear all manner of fruit 
of divers colours and odours, with many other things.” The 
reader is advised to give due attention to the signs of the Zodiac, 
for in that age astrology—the forerunner of astronomy—con- 
cerned with the supposed influence of the stars on terrestrial 
affairs, determined the times to sow and to graft; and the efforts 
of the alchemist to transmute inferior metal into gold were 
rivalled by the attempt of the horticulturist to produce hybrid 
varieties of flowers and fruit—peaches with the kernels of nuts, 
stoneless cherries, pomegranates from peaches, and so forth. 
Chaucer is a rich mine in which to dig for information on the 
subject of medieval gardens. He took many of his plots from 
Boccaccio. “The Black Death,” the most devastating of the 
five visitations of the plague in the fourteenth century, of which 
the Italian poet, in the introduction to the ‘‘ Decameron” gives a 
vivid and terrible description, swept through Europe—reaching 
Florence, where sixty thousand persons are said to have died, in 
1348, when Chaucer was eight years old. Boccaccio’s lavish praises 
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