Part 11

It was laid out near the beginning of the eighteenth century by a French gardener named Beaumont. There is nothing about it of the French manner, as we know it, for it is more in the Dutch style of the time, and has become in appearance completely English; according perfectly with the beautiful old house, and growing with it into a complete harmony of mellow age, whose sentiment is one of perfect unison both within and without.

Forward of the house-front, in a space divided by intersecting paths into six main compartments, is the garden. Flower-borders, box-edged on both sides, form bordering ornaments all round these divisions. The inner spaces are of turf. At the angles and at equal points along the borders are strange figures cut in yew and box. Some are like turned chessmen; some might be taken for adaptations of human figures, for one can trace a hat-covered head--one of them wears a crown--shoulders and arms and a spreading petticoat. Some of the yews, and these mostly in the more open spaces of grass or walk, rise four-square as solid blocks, with rounded roof and stemless mushroom finial. These have for the most part arched recesses, forming arbours. One of the tallest, standing clear on its little green, is differently shaped, being round in plan above and the stems bared all round below, with an encircling seat.

No doubt many of the yews have taken forms other than those that were originally designed; the variety of shape would be otherwise too daring; but these recklessly defiant escapes from rule only add to the charm of the place, presenting a fresh surprise at every turn. The play of light and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped evergreens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow, cold, almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising brilliancy of golden-green--often all bright gold-green when the young shoots are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of its many wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities of form, offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light, whose play upon them is infinitely varied. Then the beholder, passing on and looking back, sees the whole thing coloured and lighted anew. This quantity of Yew and Box clipped into an endless variety of fantastic forms has often been criticised as childish. Would that all gardens were childish in so happy a way! Is not the joy and perfectly innocent delight that the true lover of flowers feels in a good garden in itself akin to childishness, and is not a fine old English garden such as this, with its numberless incidents that stir and gratify the imagination, and its abundance of sweet and beautiful flowers, just the one that can give that happiness in the greatest degree? Does not the oldest of our legends, so closely bound up with our youngest apprehension of religious teaching, tell us of the earliest of our race of whom we have any record or even tradition, living happily in a garden in a state of childish innocence? Why should a garden not be childish?--perhaps when it truly deserves such a term it is the highest praise it could possibly have!

However this may be the fact remains that those who own this garden of many wonders, and watch and tend it with unceasing love and reverence, and others who have had the happiness of working in it for many days together, find it a place that never wearies, but only continues day by day to disclose new beauties and new delights. Doubtless it is a garden that cannot be fairly judged from a hasty glance or a few hours’ visit. Like many of the places and things that we call inanimate--though to one who knows and loves a garden nothing is more vitally living--such a place has its moods and can frown upon an unsympathetic beholder.

The garden is filled with many Roses and well-grown hardy plants;

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF MRS. ARCHIBALD PARKER]

those especially of tall stature making a fine effect. The Rose garden has White Pinks in its outer beds. Immediately beyond the garden’s bounds is wild ground of a beautiful character. The river Kent, a rock-strewn stream with steep wooded banks, flows within fifty yards of the house. The contrast is a great and a delightful one. Wild parkland and untamed river without; and within the walls ordered restraint; then again, the quiet of the wide bowling-green, with its dark clipped hedges, and beyond it a long, tree-shaded walk.

Precious, indeed, are the few remaining gardens that have anything of the character of this wonderful one of Levens; gardens that above all others show somewhat of the actual feeling and temperament of our ancestors. They show personal discrimination combining happily with common-sense needs; walls and masses of yew and box to make shelter from the violence of wind, and yet to admit the welcome sunlight; so to provide the best conditions in the inner spaces for the growing of lovely flowers. Then the shaping of some of the yews into strange forms, shows perhaps the whimsical humour of some one of a line of owners, preserved, with careful painstaking, by his descendants.

A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the minds of several of such possessors--men who have not only thankfully paced its green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have held it in that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure to be some living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, or its beauty. The original design may have become in some degree lost, but unless the doings of the several owners have been in the way of destruction or radical alteration, or something of obvious folly or bad taste, the garden will have gained in a remarkable degree that quality of human interest that is not easy to define but that is clearly perceptible, not only to a trained critic but to any one who has knowledge of its most vital needs and sympathy with its worthiest expression. This precious utterance is not confined to this or to any one special kind of gardening, but may pervade and illuminate almost any one of the many ways in which men find their pleasure and delight in ordering the sheltered seclusion of their home grounds, and enjoying the varied beauty of tree and bush and flower.

It is only in gardens of the most rigidly formal type, such as are full of architectural form and detail and admit of no alteration of the original plan, that personal influence can least be exercised. This is no doubt the reason why such gardens, correctly beautiful though they may be, are those that give in smallest measure that wonderful sense of the purest and most innocent happiness, that of all earthly enjoyments seems to be the most directly God-given.

Yet, even in such gardens, it is not impossible that some impress of the personal influence may be beneficently given, but the range of operation is extremely limited, the greatest knowledge and ability are needed, with the sure action of the keenest and most restrained judgment.

CAMPSEY ASHE

In Eastern Suffolk, within a few miles of the sea, is this, the country home of the Hon. William Lowther.

The house, replacing an older one that occupied the same site, is of brick and stone, built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A moat, inclosing an unusually large area, and formerly entirely encompassing the house and garden, is now partly filled up; but one long arm remains, running the greater part of the length of the house and garden; a shorter length bounding the inclosed garden on the opposite side. The longer length of moat approaches the house closely on its eastern face, and then forms the boundary of a large and beautifully-kept square lawn, with fine old cedars and other trees. Following this southward is a double walled garden, with the main paths, especially those of the nearer division, bordered with flowers. Beyond these again is the portion of the garden that forms the subject of the picture--a small parterre of box-edged beds with a row of old clipped yews beyond. This leads westward to a grove of trees, with a statue also girt with trees standing in an oval in the midmost space.

The garden has beautiful incidents in abundance, but is somewhat bewildering. Traces of the older gardening constantly appear; but their original cohesion has been lost. The moat, always an important feature, ends suddenly at four points. Garden-houses and gazebos, that usually come at salient points with determinate effect, seem to have strayed into their places. Sections of the park seem to have broken loose and lost themselves in the garden. The garden is not the less charming in detail, but is impossible to gather together or hold in a clear mental grasp, from the absence of general plan.

Besides the old clipped yews in the picture, others, apparently of the same age, inclose an oval bowling-green. In form they are as if they had been at first cut as a thick hedge with a roof-like sloping top. From this, at fairly regular intervals, spring great rounded masses, that, with the varying vigour of the individual trees and the continual clipping without reference to a fixed design, have asserted themselves after their own fashion. Though symmetry has been lost, the place has gained in pictorial value. Four ways lead in; the larger bosses guarding the entrances.

So it is throughout this charming but puzzling garden. Ever a glimpse of some delightful old-world incident, and then the baffled effort to fit together the disjointed members of what must once have been a definite design.

The portion of the garden that is simplest and clearest is a broad walk opposite the house, on the further side of the moat, and raised some ten feet above it; backed by an old yew hedge some twenty feet high, of irregular outline. Just opposite the middle of the house the line of the hedge is interrupted to give a view into the park, with a vista between groups of fine elms; but the hedge stretches away southward the whole length of the long arm of the moat and the walled gardens. At regular intervals along the old hedge are ranged, on column-shaped pedestals, busts that came from an Italian villa. About half way along steps lead down to the moat, where there is a ferry-punt propelled by an endless rope, such as is commonly used in the fenlands. At the end of the long walk is a curious seat with a high carved back, that looks as if it had once formed part of an old ship or state barge, in the bygone days of two hundred years ago, when a fine style of bold and free wood-carving was lavishly used about their raised poops and stern-galleries.

Towards the end of the second division of the walled garden is an old orangery or large garden house, that probably was in connexion with the scheme of the yew hedges. It has the usual piercing with large lights but no top-light. The original purpose of these buildings was the housing of orange and other tender trees in tubs, and the fact of its presence might possibly throw some light on the mystery of the garden’s former planning.

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF

MR. H. W. SEARCH]

Good hardy flowers are everywhere in abundance. Specially beautiful in the later summer is a grand pink Hollyhock of strong free habit, with the flowers of that best of all shapes--with wide, frilled outer petals and centres not too tightly packed.

It would be interesting work for some one with a knowledge of the garden design of the past three centuries in England to try to reconstruct the original plan of some one time. Though on the ground the various remaining portions of the older work cannot be pieced together, yet, if these were put on paper to proper scale, it might be possible to come to some general conclusions as to the way in which the garden was originally, and again perhaps subsequently, laid out. Some of the remaining portions of the older work of quite different dates may now seem to be of the same age, but the expert would probably be able to discriminate. The result of such a study would be worth having even if actual reconstruction were not contemplated.

CLEEVE PRIOR

Near a quiet village in Warwickshire, and in close relation to its accompanying farm buildings, is this charming old manor house. It is not upon a main road, but stands back in its own quiet place on rising ground above the Avon. Everything about it is interesting and quite unspoilt. The wooden hand-gate, with its acorn-topped posts, that stands upon two semi-circular steps may not have been of the pattern of the original gate--it has an eighteenth-century look--but it is just right now. It leads into a half dark, half light, double arcade of splendid old clipped yews. Looking from the gate they seem to be tall walls of yew to right and left, showing the projecting porch of the house at the end; but, passing along, there are seen to be openings between every two trees, each of which gives a charming picture of the lawns and simple flower beds to right and left. The path is paved with stone flags; the garden is bounded with a low wall of the local oolite limestone that rock-plants love. A few thin-topped old fruit-trees, their stems clothed with ivy, are another link between the past and present, and the somewhat pathetic evidence of their having long passed their prime and being on the downward path, is in striking contrast with the robust vigour of the ancient yews, already some centuries old, and looking as if they must endure for ever.

Eight yews stand on either side--sixteen in all. They are known as the twelve Apostles and the four Evangelists. The names may have belonged to them from the time of their planting, for the whole place belonged in old days to Evesham Abbey, and is pervaded with monastic memory and tradition. This may also account for the excellence of the

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF

SIR FREDERICK WIGAN]