170 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The authoress has made abundant use of the knowledge she obtained 

 through patient but withal pleasant work. The beginning of garden- 

 ing in England was coeval with the Eoman invasion. The Eomans, 

 doubtless, had well-stocked gardens attached to their houses. And as 

 the Eoman Empire crumbled, the outlying conquered provinces were 

 deserted ; and any plante or trees requiring careful cultivation perished 

 from neglect during the stormy years which succeeded the Eoman 

 rule in Britain. As monasteries became established in the country 

 a garden would be essential ; and, doubtless, the monks introduced both 

 vegetables and flowers from the Continent as early as the eleventh 

 century. The authoress gives us a plan of an orchard and vineyard 

 of the Monastery of Canterbury taken from a manuscript of 1165, but 

 except for the knowledge that such a garden existed, we gain no 

 information, and progress in any of the arts (except the art of war) 

 must have been slow in those days. The careful details of the working 

 of the monastic gardens down to the first decade of the sixteenth 

 century is very interesting. In the account of the chapel garden, which 

 belonged to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, we are told, " Three men 

 were employed four and a half days digging and cleaning the chapel 

 garden " at twopence per day. 



Much interesting information is given concerning the la^dng-ont 

 and management of gardens about six or seven hundred years ago. In 

 1250 Henry III. improved the gardens at Woodstock for his Queen. 

 High walls were built round the garden, and in 1252 orders were given 

 to " turf the great herbarium." In 1260 alterations were carried out 

 in the garden round Windsor Castle, and there is a record of wages 

 paid. The King's gardener was paid a hundred shillings a year, and 

 the labourers two and a half pence a day. There were also Eoyal 

 gardens at Westminster, Charing, and the Tower. 



Apple trees, pear trees, and vines were cultivated; the vine-dresser | 

 v/as classed with the gardener in many of the household accounts of the j 

 period preserved at the Eecord Office. In the fourteenth century many ,| 

 varieties of fruits and flowers were in cultivation. Chaucer in the | 

 " Eomaunt of the Eose " gives the names of the following fruits as being j 

 cultivated in his time (he died at the age of seventy-two in 1400): j 

 Peaches, Quinces, Apples, Pears, Medlars, Plums, Cherries, Chestnuts, j 

 Nuts, "Aleis," the lote tree, the Bullace : and many trees are { 

 mentioned in the same passage. Grafting was well understood at 

 this time, the Apple being grafted on Apple stock and Pear on the 

 Hawthorn. 



At a time that has in some respects been aptly termed the midnight i 

 of the dark ages in England, gardening flourished, and especial re- 

 ference is made to the culture of the grape vine, and facing p. 22 1 

 there is an illustration of vine-pruners at w^ork, taken from an Anglo- 

 Saxon manuscript of the eleventh century, and the vine-dresser seemed 

 to be quite as important an individual as the head gardener. If our 

 climate has not greatly deteriorated, grapes of the Sweet Water and 

 Muscadine kinds ought to be grown of good quahty in well-pla^jed 



