“A Shelf of Old Gardening Books” 
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GARDEN AT HEYTHROP HOUSE, CHIPPING NORTON 
terrace tempts him abroad. The river in all its 
glory flows at his feet, as Thomson sings: 
—“the silver Thames first rural grows, 
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt, 
In Twit’nam’s bowers.” 
Pope’s garden was not a large one—only five acres; 
but in this space he had a delightful flower garden, 
which he tended with his own hands, an orangery, 
bowling-green and vineyard. There he loved to 
entertain his friends, and many a feast of wit was 
spread beneath those rural shades which the poet 
loved so well. 
No library of gardening books is complete without 
Horace Walpole’s “Essay on Modern Gardening,” 
(1785) in which he glories in his rich acquaintances 
quite as much as in his flower-beds. As a lover of 
the old English formal garden, and as a scorner of 
the hateful devastating crew of landscape-gardeners, 
Bridgman, Kent, and above all, “Capability” Brown, 
I cannot treat with patience the writing of Walpole, 
who paved the way for their detestable enormities. 
He pours scorn on “the measured walk, the quin¬ 
cunx and the etoile,” imposing their unsatisfying 
sceneries on our royal and noble gardens. Trees 
were headed, and their sides pared away; many 
French groves seem green chests set upon green 
poles. Seats of marble, arbours and summer houses 
terminated every vista, and symmetry, even when the 
space was too large to permit its being remarked at 
our view, was so essential that, as Pope observed: 
“ Each alley has a brother, 
And half the garden just reflects the other.” 
Happily, his taste for formal gardens was not killed 
by Walpole’s diatribes, and modern eyes appreciate 
their beauties. 
I have here a curious old gardening book, called 
the “Systema Horticultura, or the Art of Gardening,” 
by J. Woolridge, gent: published at the Harrow over 
against the Inner Temple Gate in Fleet Street in 
1688. There was an earlier edition in 1677. This 
is the earliest manual for the forming and cultivating 
gardens, and tells us much about the treatment and 
virtue of different soils: the form of the ground, 
giving two delightful plates of the round and square 
gardens; the erection of arbors and summer-houses, 
garden seats and benches; and much about dials, 
and how to grow flowers and fruit trees. Here 
speaks the true garden lover: 
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