274 WOOD AND GARDEN 



antiquity, colossal -works of the rulers of Imperial Rome, 

 and tlie later gardens of the Middle Ages (direct de- 

 scendants of those greater and older ones), some of them 

 still among the most beautiful gardens on earth. He 

 sees how the taste for gardening grew and travelled, 

 spreading through Europe and reaching England, first, 

 no doubt, through her Roman invaders. He becomes 

 more and more aware of what great and enduring happi- 

 ness may be enjoyed in a garden, and how all that he 

 can learn of it in the leisure intervals of his earlier 

 maturity, and then in middle life, will help to brighten 

 his later days, when he hopes to refine and make better 

 the garden of the old home by a reverent application 

 of what he has learnt. He thinks of the desecrated old 

 bowling-green, cut up to suit the fashion of thirty years 

 ago into a patchwork of incoherent star and crescent 

 shaped beds ; of how he will give it back its ancient char- 

 acter of unbroken repose ; he thinks how he will restore 

 the string offish-ponds in the bottom of the wooded vaUey 

 just below, now a rushy meadow with swampy hollows 

 that once were ponds, and humpy mounds, ruins of the 

 ancient dikes ; of how the trees will stand reflected in 

 the still water ; and how he will live to see again in 

 middle hours of summer days, as did the monks of 

 old, the broad backs of the golden carp basking just 

 below the surface of the sun-warmed water. 



And such a man as this comes home some day and 

 finds the narrow-minded gardener, who believes that he 

 already knows all that can be known about gardening. 



