AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
Obviously the reference is to a fashion prevalent at the time, 
of planting in beds and plots, a fashion that was not set in the 
Garden of Eden, and therefore not commendable. 
Such, as far as I can gather, was ‘‘ the happy garden state” 
of our ancestors up to the eighteenth century. Old-world gardens, 
in many respects unchanged, may yet be found “in and round 
London,” to one or two of which I shall later introduce you. 
They are touched, it is true, by ‘‘ decay’s defacing finger,” but 
they are still flowery, shady, and sunshiny too. In them old- 
fashioned flowers—the cabbage rose, the sweet william, the stock, 
the monkshood, the snapdragon, and the pansy—flourish ; and in 
spite of dividing walks of springy turf, and borders of ancient box, 
elbow each other in their eagerness to invade the territory of the 
turnip and the cabbage. There, in the months of April, May and 
June, the lilac and the hawthorn intermingle boughs and blossoms, 
and, in August and September, peaches slowly ripen on sunny 
walls, whilst apples grow rosy in other quarters. 
In such a garden, reminiscent of the time when orchard and 
garden were one, apple-trees, pear-trees, and plum-trees, hoary with 
age, mossy with long inertia (in some sense an illustration of the 
proverb that “rolling stones gather no moss”), mount guard over 
the vegetable kingdom, dropping windfalls for the children to pick 
up. They stretch gnarled and twisted arms benevolently over the 
rosemary and southernwood, the lavender and the rose-bushes, as 
though in mute benediction on the little ones playing, or on the 
lovers seated, beneath. 
The names of four distinguished Englishmen, who were experi- 
mental and practical gardeners, stand out conspicuously in_the 
history of horticulture in this country during the years intervening 
between the beginning of the seventeenth and the latter half of 
the eighteenth century. They are Francis Bacon Lord St. Albans, 
Sir William Temple, John Evelyn the diarist, and Horace Walpole. 
The ideas of the aristocratic Bacon on the subject of pleasure- 
grounds are on a grandiose scale. In his famous essay, ‘“‘ Of 
Gardens,”’ he says that the ideal garden should comprise not less 
than thirty acres of ground, and he tells us that he is speaking only 
of those that are ‘‘ indeed Prince-like.”’ 
Dying in 1626, in the second year of the reign of the unhappy 
Charles I., it is probable that, owing to the vastness of his 
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