House and Garden 
and he makes Diocletian say to the ambassadors 
who were enticing him to a throne, 
“ If I, my friends, ‘ said he,’ should to you show 
All the delights which in these gardens glow; 
'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, 
Than ’tis that you should carry me away.” 
Cowley’s love for gardens, trees and fountains was 
natural and sincere. He had the “inward eye 
which is the bliss of solitude,” and discovered in the 
meanest flower or weed by the hedge-row 
“ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears ” 
Here is an old volume of the evergreen “Gentle¬ 
man’s Magazine,” which contains a chapter on old 
gardens. The writer mentions Hollar’s en¬ 
graving of Boscobel, Lord Arundel’s seat 
in Surrey, the delicious pleasure- 
grounds of Sir Matthew Decker on 
Richmond Green, where the pine¬ 
apple was first brought to perfec¬ 
tion; Biddington, the place of the 
Carews, and the home of the 
earliest orange-tree planted in 
England, and Ham House on 
the hanks of the Thames, 
shaded by spreading elms, 
which Evelyn describes with 
its parterres, orangeries, 
groves, fountains and aviaries. 
Miss Mitford, the charming 
authoress of “Our Village,” 
who lived a few miles from 
where I am writing, has 
also sketched Ham House: 
“It is a perfect model of the 
mansion of the last century, 
with its dark, shadowy front, its 
steps and terraces, its marble 
basins, and its deep, silent court. 
Harlow Place must have been such 
an abode of stateliness and seclusion. 
These iron gates seem to have been 
erected for no other purpose than to 
divide Lovelace from Clarissa—they 
look so stern and unrelenting. If there 
are any Clarissas now-a-days, they would be found 
at Ham House. And the keeping is so perfect. 
The very flowers are old-fashioned—no American 
borders, no kalmias or azaleas, or magnolias, or 
such heathen shrubs. No flimsy China roses. 
Nothing new-fangled. None but flowers of the 
olden time, arranged in gay, formal knots, staid 
and trim, and regular, and without a leaf awry.” A 
good description truly of a perfect garden. 
Milton’s Paradise Lost is not often regarded as a 
gardening book, hut in his description of Eden we 
find a fairly accurate picture of the gardens of Eng¬ 
land in his day. He tells of “groves whose rich 
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE 
trees wept odorous gums and balm,” flowers of all 
hues and “without thorn the rose,” of lawns, or level 
downs, umbrageous grots and caves, of cool recess 
covered with mantling vine, of murmuring waters, 
lakes with fringed bank, with myrtle crowned reflected 
in the crystal mirror. He tells of wondrous flowers: 
“ which not nice art 
In beds and curious knots, but nature bom 
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.” 
A wonderfully beautiful garden which Horace Wal¬ 
pole recognizes as a glorified Hagley, or Stourhead, 
or as a poetical description of the royal grounds of 
I heobalds and Nonsuch. 
Sir William Temple was a notable gardener, and 
writer of garden literature. Here is his 
essay, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, 
or Gardening in the year 1685,” 
which, after “much rambling into 
ancient times and remote places,” 
tells of the present way and 
humor of our gardening in Eng¬ 
land which seems to have 
grown into such vogue and to 
have been so mightily im¬ 
proved in three or four and 
twenty years of His Majesty’s 
reign, that perhaps few 
countries are before us, 
either in the elegance of our 
gardens or in the number of 
our plants; and I believe 
none equals us in the variety 
of fruits which may justly be 
called food; and from the 
earliest cherry and strawberry, 
to the last apples and pears, 
may furnish every day of the 
circling year. Temple’s garden, 
at Sheen, was the wonder of the 
age, but he says that “the perfectest 
figure of a garden I ever saw, at home 
or abroad, was that of Moor Park in 
Hertfordshire,” made by the famous 
Countess of Bedford. 
Pope, who began his literary life 
a few miles from where we are sitting—is not 
Pope’s Wood at Binfield named after him ? and 
is there not a tree standing with the inscription, 
“Here Pope sang?”—planted a fair garden at 
Twickenham. See, here is his letter to Richardson, 
whither in the freshness of a summer morning, 
he invites his friend to pass the day among its 
shades, and “as much of the night as a fine 
moon allows.” From the noon-tide heat he re¬ 
treats into his grotto, fit haunt of poetry and wood 
nymphs. Sails gliding up and down the river cast 
a faint, vanishing gleam through a sloping arcade of 
trees. As the sun sets behind the branches, his 
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