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garden, originally made in 1550, was altered in 1708, and has 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