Two English Gardens 
There are two English gardens you must see before you die in 
ease they should not be reproduced in Heaven, — Hever Castle 
and Iford Manor. They are completely charming each in its own 
way and beautiful beyond any other gardens I have ever seen. 
Hever is the creation, — or rather re-creation — of a very rich man 
with money, time and enthusiasm to spend upon it. Iford is 
more modest and personal but no less beautiful. 
We have a way in America of turning up our noses at ex- 
patriots, and the late Lord Astor did not escape our notice, but to 
do what he has done at Hever, he must have been a man of infinite 
patience, unerring taste and great knowledge. In this castle Anne 
Boleyn spent her girlhood, and Henry the Eighth courted her 
there ; a true-lover 's knot of Yew entwining their initials is spread 
at your feet as you enter. The building is a moated Manor House 
of the fifteenth century with draw-bridge, portcullis and paved 
courtyard intact. It is one of the few left in all England that 
stands just as it did in the days of its youth ; it was a shell when 
Lord Astor took it and spent five years in restoring all its ancient 
glory -with the added glories of magnificent portraits of the period, 
possessions of Anne Boleyn and her family, and superb panelling, 
some of it old and some excellently reproduced. The most 
ingenious aspect of the building is the way it has been enlarged. 
You look out upon a clustering red-roofed village lying close 
under the walls of the castle, — really it is the Guest Houses and 
service quarters each with its long straight corridor, the rooms 
leading off in all manner of shapes and sizes so that the exterior 
resembles little cottages, — detached and charming. 
Xot more than fifteen years ago the gardens were planted and 
now the Yew is dense and high as that in any ancient garden. 
And such Yew ! A maze that is a wonder of solid green walls, a 
set of extraordinary chessmen sitting solemnly in their big red 
and white squares, birds and beasts and spirals and oddments, a 
triumph of determination over nature, and impatience over time, 
all resulting in a perfect Tudor garden that Henry the Eighth 
might have planted if he had had the education. 
But that isn't all. You follow an allee with wide grassy 
steps to an Italian garden, the most lordly, but at the same time, 
the sweetest you have ever seen. On each side of great stretches 
of lawn are columns or walls or broken bits of masonry or 
pergolas or balustrades, some sunken, some led to by flights of 
moss-grown stairs, all overhung by creepers and sturdy, sweet- 
smelling plants. In the center is a Roman Bath enclosed with the 
best Yew hedges of all, with Yew-walled dressing rooms. At 
the end is an artificial lake with a stated water-front. It sounds 
exaggerated, and it is — but only too beautifully. 
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