Part 12

buildings, for the old monks were grand constructors, and their structures were not only solid but always beautiful.

One of the older of these at Cleeve Prior is a large circular dovecote of stone masonry with tiled roof and small tiled cupola. Such buildings were not unfrequent in the old days, and many of them remain. Sometimes they are round in plan, sometimes four-, sometimes eight-sided. Occasionally there is a central post inside, set on pivots to revolve easily, with lateral arms carrying a ladder that reaches nearly to the walls, so that any one of the many pigeon-holes can be reached.

To the left of the Apostles’ Garden, as you stand facing the house, a little gate leads into the vegetable garden. It has narrow grass paths bordered with old-fashioned flowers. A further gate leads into the orchard. Behind the house is the home close with some fine trees; on two other sides are the farm buildings, yard and rickyard.

How grandly the flowers grow in these old manor and farm gardens! How finely the great masses of bloom compose, and how beautifully they harmonise with the grey of the limestone wall and the wonderful colour of the old tiled roof; both of them weather and lichen-stained; each tile a picture in itself of grey and orange and tenderest pink.

The yews have got over their paler green colour of the early summer when the young shoots are put forth, and have settled into the deep green dress that they will wear till next May. For the time is September; wheat harvesting is going on and the autumn flowers are in full vigour. There are Dahlias, the great annual Sunflowers and the tall autumn Daisy; Lavender and Michaelmas Daisies, with sweet herbs for the kitchen, just as it should be in such a garden.

Some of these old pot-herbs are beautiful things deserving a place in any flower garden. Sage--for instance--a half shrubby plant with handsome grey leaf and whorled spikes of purple flowers; a good plant both for winter and summer, for the leaves are persistent and the plant well clothed throughout the year. Hyssop is another such handsome thing, of the same family, with a quantity of purple bloom in the autumn, when it is a great favourite with the butterflies and bumble bees. This is one of the plants that was used as an edging plant in gardens in Tudor days, as we read in Parkinson’s “Paradisus,” where Lavender-cotton, Marjoram, Savoury and Thyme are also named as among the plants used for the same purpose. Rue, with its neat bluish-green foliage, is also a capital plant for the garden where this colour of leafage is desired. Fennel, with its finely-divided leaves and handsome yellow flower, is a good border plant, though rarely so used, and blooms in the late autumn. Lavender and Rosemary are both so familiar as flower-garden plants that we forget that they can also be used as neat edgings, if from the time they are young plants they are kept clipped. Borage has a handsome blue flower, as good as its relation the larger Anchusa. Tansy, best known in gardens by the handsome Achillea Eupatorium, was an old inmate of the herb garden. Sweet Cicely (Myrrhis odorata) has beautiful foliage, pale green and fern-like, with a good umbel of white bloom, and is a most desirable plant to group with and among early blooming flowers. And we all know what a good garden flower is the common Pot Marigold.

The old farm buildings at Cleeve Prior are scarcely less beautiful than the manor-house itself, and are remarkable for the timber erections, open at the sides but with tiled roofs, that give sheltered access, by outside stairways, to the lofts.

Throughout England the older farmhouses and buildings are full of interest, not only to architects, but to many who are in sympathy with good and simple construction, and have taken the pleasant trouble to learn enough about it to understand how and why the buildings were reared. And in these restless days of hurry and strain and close competition in trades, and bad, cheap work, it is good to pass a quiet hour in wandering about among structures set up four or even five centuries ago by these grand building monks. The present writer had just such a pleasure not long ago in the South of England, where a large group of monastic farm buildings stands within sound of the wash of the sea. They are on sloping ground, inclosing three sides of a square; a wall, backed with trees, forming the fourth side. On the upper level is a great barn; a much greater, the tithe barn, being opposite it on the lower. Buildings containing stables, cattle-sheds and piggeries connect the two. Between these and the wall opposite is a spacious yard; across the middle is a raised causeway dividing the yard into two levels.

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF

MR. JAMES CROFTS POWELL]

The barns are of grand masonry. Some of the stones, next above the plinth--a feature that adds so much to the dignity of the building, and by its additional width, to its solidity--measure as much as four feet six inches in length by twenty inches in height. In every fifth course is a row of triangular holes for ventilation, such as every brick or stone-built barn must have. They are cleverly arranged as to the detail of the manner of their building, and though only intended for use have a distinctly ornamental value. Where the walls rise at the gable ends they are corbelled out at the eaves and carried up some two feet above the line of the rafters, finishing in a wrought stone capping, thus stopping the thatch. For the buildings are, and always have been, thatched with straw, the ground around being good corn-land, a rich calcareous loam.

There is a delightful sense of restfulness about these fine solid buildings, built for the plainest needs of the community of the material nearest to hand, in the simply right and therefore most beautiful way. With no intentional ornament, they have the beauty of sound, strong structure and unconsciously right proportion. There is also a satisfaction in the plain evidence of delight in good craftsmanship, and in the unsparing use of both labour and material.

CONDOVER

Condover Hall near Shrewsbury is a stately house of important size and aspect--one of the many great houses that were reared in the latter half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Its general character gives the impression of severity rather than suavity, though the straight groups of chimneys have handsome heads, and the severe character is mitigated on the southern front by an arcade in the middle space of the ground floor. The same stern treatment pervades the garden masonry. No mouldings soften the edges of the terrace steps; parapets and retaining walls, with the exception of the balustrade of the main terrace, are without ornament of light and shade; plainly weathered copings being their only finish. Only here and there, a pier that carries a large Italian flower-pot has a little more ornament of rather massive bracket form.

The garden spaces are large and largely treated, as befits the place and its environment of park-land amply furnished with grand masses of tree-growth. On the southern side of the house, where the ground falls away, are two green flats and slopes, leading to a lower walk parallel with their length and with the terrace above. The steps in the picture are the top flight of a succession leading to these lower levels. The lower and narrower grassy space has a row of clipped yews of a rounded cone-shape. The upper level has a design of the same, but of different patterns.

The balustrade in the picture is old, probably of the same date as the house; much of the other stonework is modern. The circular seat on a raised platform, with its stone-edged flower-beds, has a very happy effect, and its yew-hedge backing joins well into the older yews that

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF

MISS AUSTEN LEIGH]

overlap the parapet of the steps; their colour contrasting distinctly with that of the more distant Ilex, a magnificent example of a tree that deserves more general use in English gardens. The parterre above the steps and on a level with the house has box hedges, after the Italian manner, three feet high and two feet wide. These, with some of the yew hedges, were planted a hundred years ago, though much of the garden, with its ornaments of fine Italian flower-pots, was the work of the former owner, the late Mr. Reginald Cholmondeley, a man of powerful personality and fine taste.

The most important part of the garden lies to the west of the house, where there is a double garden of stiff pattern with high box borders and clipped evergreens. At a right angle to this, the spectator, standing at some distance westward, and looking back towards the east and straight with the space between the pair of gardens of angular design, sees a broad space flanked on either side by a row of handsome upright yews. The ground between is a flower garden of large diamond-shaped beds in two sizes, with cleverly-arranged green edgings. But now that the large Irish yews have grown to their early maturity, dominating the garden and insisting on their own strong parallel lines, it is open to question whether it would not have been better to have had a wide, clear middle space of green straight down the length, with the flowers in shapely, ordered masses to right and left. The close succession of large beds gives the impression of impediments to comfortable progress.

It was wise to leave the Irish yews unclipped. Though the common English yew is the tree that is of all others the most docile to the discipline of training and shearing, the upright growing variety will have none of it. In some fine English gardens they are clipped, always with disastrous effect. They will only take one form: that of an ugly swollen bottle, or lamp-chimney with a straight top. Their own form is quite symmetrical enough for use in any large design.

SPEKE HALL

There are, alas! but few now remaining of the timber buildings of the sixteenth century that are either so important in size or so well-preserved as this beautiful old Lancashire house.

They were built at a time when the country had settled down into a peaceable state; when houses need no longer be walled and loopholed against the probable raids of enemies; when their windows might be of ample size and might look abroad without fear. Many of them, however, were still moated, for a moat was of use not only for defence but as a convenient fish-pond, and as a bar to the depredations of wolves, foxes and rabbits.

The advance of civilisation also brought with it a greater desire for home comforts, and the genius of the country, unspoilt, unfettered, undiluted by that mass of half-digested knowledge of many styles that has led astray so many of the builders of modern days, by a natural instinct cast these dwellings into forms that we now seek out and study in the effort to regain our lost innocence, and that in many cases we are glad to adopt anew as models of what is most desirable for comfort and for the happy enjoyment of our homes.

Still, in these days we cannot build such houses anew without a suspicion of strain or affectation. When they were reared, oak was the building material most readily to be obtained, and carpenters’ work, already well developed in the construction of roofs, now given free scope in outer walls as well, seemed to revel in the new liberty, and oak-framed houses grew up into beautiful form and ornament in such a way as has never been surpassed in this country.

FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF

MR. GEORGE S. ELGOOD]