GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
flat effect was aimed at. ‘‘ Knots and parterres,” we are told, 
‘““beeame so elaborate that the small tortured spaces between 
the box patternings were less and less homes for plants, more and 
more filled with coloured sand.’ Topiary work—that is, clipping 
and training trees and shrubs into fantastic shapes—now came 
into fashion, but as yet was not carried to excess, and the seven- 
teenth-century garden, no doubt, had much beauty. J. D. Sped- 
ding says: ‘‘ There is about the Jacobean Garden an air of 
scholarlism and courtliness, a flavour of dreamland and Arcadia 
and Italy—a touch of the Archaic and classical—yet the thing is 
saved from utter artificiality by our English love of outdoor 
life °—and also, I suggest, by that independence of restraint that 
is innate in the British character. And ever we find the English 
gardener, except when by force of circumstances he came very 
much under foreign influences, indisposed towards formalism; 
though of course the ideal garden holds the balance between nature 
arid art. 
John Evelyn, author of the famous diary, did much more than 
Bacon, with all his theories and experiments, to advance horti- 
culture. Whilst Bacon schemed and talked, Evelyn was _ prac- 
tical. He was born in 1620 at Dorking, of parents who occupied 
a good position, and he was educated at. Balliol. A devoted 
Royalist, he yet seems to have placed prudence before patriotism, 
as he understood it, for, lest he and his brother should be exposed 
to ruin by their espousal of the King’s cause without any com- 
pensating advantage to His Majesty, he joined the King’s army 
only to leave it at the end of three days. After travelling on the 
Continent for four years, he returned to England, and settled 
in 1652, at Sayes Court, near Deptford, where he was able to indulge 
his horticultural tastes. But Evelyn was a courtier as well as a 
gardener, and after the-Restoration we find him much at White- 
hall, and occupying several official posts. And he was from the 
beginning a prominent member of the newly-founded Royal 
Society. 
His diary—not published until a hundred and twelve years after 
his death, and of which Sir Walter Scott said he ‘“‘ had never seen so 
rich a mine ”’—is no less illuminating in the light it throws on 
the history of his day, than that of his lively contemporary, Pepys. 
From time to time in its pages—pages that deal with the important 
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