vi. 



INTRODUCTION. 



other shapes. I do again name the yew, for hedges, preferable for beauty and a stiff defence, 

 to any plant I have seen." This last remark' is undoubtedly true, and still none can deny that a 

 good yew hedge is an admirable background and protection for Hollyhocks, Dahlias, Lilies, and all 

 tall-growing flowers. Although great destruction has been wrought amid the yew hedges of former 

 times, man_\' that are ancient, if not quite of Tudor aye, still remain. At Albury is a hedge 

 ioft. high, and a quarter of a mile long, said to have been designed by Evelyn for the Earl of 

 Arundel. At the Palace, Hadham, Hertfordshire, which mice belonged to the Bishops of London, 

 is a garden said to date back" to Tudor times, enclosed on two sides by a high wall, while the 

 other side is protected by a yew hedge 3yds. thick". There are yew hedges at Bishopsboume, 

 near Canterbury, said to have been planted by Richard Honker about 1595, and now about 14ft. 

 high and ioft. thick. The yew was, indeed, a great feature of old English gardens, and men 

 loved it with a certain reverence for the service it rendered them. Thus appropriately does 

 Dr. Conan Doyle, in his " Song of the Bow," speak of its making — 



" Ol true wood, <>f yew wood, 

 The wood of English bow s ; 



So men who are free 



Love tlie old yew tree, 

 And the land where the yew tree grows." 



But it is worthy of remark that the yew tree was answerable for very important changes 

 that passed over our gardens. The "ductile" yew lent itself readily to the topiary gardener. 

 Now the " topiarius " had been a familiar figure even in Virgil's days, and it was only his 

 extravagancies that made him ridiculous. Bacon did not like " images cut out of juniper and 

 other garden stuff; they be for children." But the taste yrew, and the extreme of absurdity 

 was reached about the time of William and Mary, when the yew was cut, not only into 

 hedges, cones, and pyramids, but into the shapes of men, beasts, birds, fish, ships, and the 

 like. There are early examples of cut trees, without this extravagance, which command our 

 respect, as in tlie remarkable example in the gardens of Levens Hall, Kendal, others at 

 Heslington, near York, in a garden laid out about 1687 by Beaumont, the gardener of 

 Hampton Court, and the strange Four Evangelists and Twelve Apostles at Cleeve Prior. 



But such a style, carried to an extreme of folly, worked its own remedy. It attracted 

 the satire of Addison and Pope. The latter was bitter in his deriding of the fashion in his 

 descriptions of examples for sale: "Adam and Eve in yew, Adam a little shattered by the 

 fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent, very flourishing; 

 St. George, in box, his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the dragon 

 by next April ; divers eminent modem poets, in bays, somewhat blighted, to be disposed of 

 a pennyworth ; a quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy 

 weather." Out of this satire came destruction. We still may think with delight of the old 

 Scotch garden depicted so delightfully by Scott at Tully Veolan, beloved of Waverley and 

 Rose Bradwardine. But, though some places escaped, a new spirit had been evoked, and Kent 

 and Brown, and their successors and imitators, swept away many a garden of the olelen time. 



The landscape school sought to import the qualities of wild nature into the garden, 

 to extend great sweeps of lawn, broken by clumps of trees, with lakes, creating simple 

 landscape effects. Where features were necessary, they introduced objects not always more 

 rational than those they had derided — grottoes, classic temples, hermits' cells, broken columns, 

 Gothic ruins, and other like artificialities. Into the poor landscape style was imported the more 

 grandiose fashion of Le Notre, to which we owe the great fountains and splendid avenues 

 which are truly a glory of the land. 



Then came a reaction from the attempt to create the purely natural, and many broken 

 styles, or fashions wanting styles, arose. These shall not be described here. They were 

 all striving upward to the kind of gardening we are accustomed to to-day. There are still 

 no settled principles, and it may be desirable that there should be none. What we look for 

 is natural delight in the garden, and a development of its possibilities. We are living now 



