206 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



filled with one design, in others it was divided into four, and 

 the pattern repeated in each section. 



Between the parterres were borders, formed either of a 

 sanded path with a strip of grass or flowers on either side, or 

 shrubs placed at intervals, but the " most common" borders 

 " are wrought with a sharp rising in the middle, like the back 

 of an ass, and set with yews, shrubs, and flowers." Canons 

 Ashby as it is at the present day is a good example of this 

 date of garden, and the parterres, as shown in the plan kindly 

 made by the owner, the late Sir Henry Dryden, are such as 

 might have been seen in any garden of this date, though the 

 design perhaps is more simple than in many of them. The 

 garden, originally made in 1550, was altered in 1708, and has 

 defied the changes of fashion for nearly two centuries. It is 

 just such a garden as Celia Fiennes described as " neatly kept, 

 with fine gravel walks, grass-plotts, and beyond a garden of 

 flower-trees and all sorts of herbage and store of fruits." 



Incidental remarks in that lady's journal throw light upon 

 town-gardening. Before such great difficulties in the way of 

 smoke had to be contended with, town-gardens needed no more 

 care than country ones, and many town-houses had fine 

 gardens attached to them. When they were simple, small, and 

 enclosed, there was no reason why as pleasant and secluded 

 ones should not be made in towns as in the open country. 

 Fine old-fashioned gardens are still to be seen in the Cathedral 

 cities, or in some few large market-towns where smoke and 

 overcrowding have not destroyed them. But long ago, when 

 each good house had its garden, the aspect of the towns must 

 indeed have been different. Public parks and gardens are 

 no new invention, although so vastly improved even of late 

 years, in spite of all the disadvantages of fog, smoke, and 

 darkness. Certainly from Cowley's poem one would imagine 

 the smoke nuisance to have been as troublesome in the middle 

 of the seventeenth as at the beginning of the twentieth century : 



" Who that has reason and a smell 

 Would not among Roses and Jesamine dwell 

 Rather than all his spirits choak 

 With exhalations of dust and smoak, 

 And all the uncleanness which does drown 

 In pestilential clouds a populous town." 



