House and Garden 
the voices of his nightingales. His Pavilion— 
seen in the illustration on page 6, which also 
gives a partial view of his Labyrinth—is a 
square building, faced, within and without, 
with purple azulejos, except for the wooden 
roof. All around the outside of this ideal 
summer-house runs a raised mosaic bench, 
enclosed by a colonnade of white marble. 
The interior contains a table surrounded by 
seats. On the floor is wrought in bronze a 
miniature plan of the Labyrinth—a maze of 
the small-leaved myrtle, with a statue and a 
fountain in the center. 
But if the garden itself is eloquent of 
Charles V., the arcaded wall echoes the ter¬ 
rible tread of Pedro the Cruel. He was the 
restorer, through Moorish architects sum¬ 
moned from Granada, of the Alcazar, which 
had been erected toward the close of the 
twelfth century on the site of a Roman prae¬ 
tor's palace. Pedro did his rebuilding 
( T 353—64) a century and a half later, and al¬ 
though successive sovereigns tampered with 
his work, introducing incongruous Spanish 
features into the Arabian design, the Alca¬ 
zar, as it stands, is Pedro’s memorial. Halls 
and courts and gardens are replete with leg¬ 
ends of his fantastic tyrannies and of his 
overweening passion for Maria de Padilla. 
H er apartments were at the west end of the 
south facade, overlooking the gardens, and 
her Parterre was close against the palace. It 
may be distinguished by its pillars, not far 
beyond the fish pond, in the illustration on 
page 8, or by its towering magnolias shown 
in the frontispiece. 
Pedro’s own name is borne by the Gallery, 
or covered walk, along the eastern wall. 
There is a terrace, as well as a lower prom¬ 
enade, running the length of the Alcazar 
fa9ade, which, as may be seen on page 2, 
is hollowed out into a series of alcoves. 
These are furnished with porcelain seats and, 
looking to the south as they do, must be de¬ 
lightful rooms in winter. When the visitor 
has paced the terrace to the eastern extremity 
of the palace front, he can turn to the south 
and continue his walk, on another open ter¬ 
race, at the same elevation, the length of 
Don Pedro’s wall. This upper walk is most 
clearly shown in the illustration on page 2. 
On rainy days he might prefer the lower walk, 
the Gallery of Pedro the Cruel, which is 
closed on the outside, but opens toward the 
gardens in a series of rustic arches, formed of 
rugged stones such as are used for grottoes, 
dark brown in color. These arches are sup¬ 
ported by fragments of antique marble col¬ 
umns, brought from the ruined Roman am¬ 
phitheatre at ltalica, five miles out of Seville. 
The wall itself is clad on the garden side, for 
a third of its height, by trained orange-trees. 
Behind the Pavilion of Charles V., may be 
seen a square garden-house in which the 
terrace walk terminates. Here one may 
rest, in this bright-tiled, open-air parlor, and 
enjoy the far-reaching views, seeing how the 
Sultana of the South is clasped in the pro¬ 
tecting arm of the Guadalquivir and look¬ 
ing far away over a landscape where the em¬ 
erald green of the fig-trees, the bluish-green 
of the aloes and the ashen green of the olives 
are all lost, at last, in the purple of the An¬ 
dalusian sky. 
The garden is laid out on different levels, 
as is often done in Spain. The terraced 
Generalife thus secures continual refreshment 
of falling water, but in misty Galicia what is 
caused by such an arrangement is more of 
heat rather than of coolness. Senora Pardo 
Bazan, in one of her novels of Galician life, 
describes the garden of a rural proprietor 
as “a series of walls built one above another, 
like the steps of a stairway, sustaining nar¬ 
row belts of earth. This disposition of the 
ground gave the vegetation an exuberance 
that was almost tropical. Camelias, peach- 
trees and lemon-trees grew in wild luxuri¬ 
ance, laden at once with leaves, fruits and 
blossoms.” 
The trees and shrubs of the Alcazar gar¬ 
dens are of many varieties—palm, magnolia, 
cypress,cedar, myrtle, orange, lemon, banana, 
oleander, pomegranate, medlar, citron, al¬ 
mond, and the leafless coral-tree, with its 
brilliant scarlet blossoms; but the box is 
most in evidence. As convent gardens pre¬ 
fer cypresses and palms, symbols of heaven¬ 
ward aspiration, so the gardens of the Span¬ 
ish nobility cherish the boxwood. “The em¬ 
blem among plants of aristocracy ! ” exclaims 
a high-born lady in Fernan Caballero’s 
“ Elia.” “ It is not found growing wild nor 
in the gardens of the common people. The 
box, whose fragrance has such distinction ! 
It never stains the ground with fallen leaves, 
7 
