50 
A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 
garden into the orchard or meadow. If high hedges and 
walls were retained in later times on account of their beauty 
or shelter, it was certainly with a view to security that they 
were originally adopted. 
“ I saw a garden right anoon 
Full long and broad and everidele 
Enclosed was and walled wele 
With hie walles embatailed.” 1 
Within the enclosure all was trim and neat. All round 
against the wall a bank of earth was thrown up, the front of 
which was faced with brick or stone, and the mould planted 
with sweet-smelling herbs. At intervals there were recesses 
with seats or benches covered with turf, “ theck yset and soft 
as any velvet/’ Low mounds of earth were also made here 
and there, in the garden, “ on which one might sit and rest,” 
and these “ benches ” were also “ turved with newe turves 
grene.” The little paths throughout the garden were covered 
with sand or gravel, and kept free from weeds. Lydgate 
mentions a garden, in which “ all the alleys were made playne 
with sand.” 2 
No garden was considered complete without its arbour, its 
” privy playing place.” They were either set in a nook in the 
wall, or in a part of the garden sheltered by a thick hedge. 
The arbour, or “ herber,” was made of trees thickly inter¬ 
twined with climbing plants, to screen those within from the 
eyes of the intruder. One is thus described in The Flower 
and the Leaf: 
“ And at the last a path of little brede 
I found, that greatly had not used be, 
For it forgrowen was with grasse and weede, 
That well-unneth 3 a wighte might it se : 
Thought I, this path some whidar goth, parde, 
And so I followed, till it me brought 
To right a pleasaunt herber well y wrought.” 
That benched was and with turfes new 
Freshly turved, whereof the grene gras, 
So small, so thicke, so short, so fresh of hew, 
1 Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose, 1 . 136. 
2 The Chorle and the Bird . 3 —scarcely, hardly , 
