Part 20

The time of year of this picture is in or near the second week of July, when the White Lily is at its finest, and the Orange Lily is in bloom, with the Blue Delphinium and many another good garden flower. One can see how all the best garden flowers are utilised here. There is the White Sidalcea at the front of the border, one of the many plants of the Mallow family that are so important in our borders; for our grand Hollyhocks are Mallows too. This White Sidalcea has much the same value as the large White Snapdragon, one good variety of which, the precursor of the many good large kinds now grown, was the only one of its kind at the time the picture was painted. Of late their numbers have greatly increased, and also their stature and the variety of their beautiful colourings, so that now they can be used as tall plants of great effect. Six feet two inches was the measurement of one grand spike of soft, rosy colouring in the writer’s own garden last autumn. These capital plants have been “fixed,” as gardeners say, in ranges of different heights; tall, intermediate, and the quite dwarf little cushions whose form is perhaps as little suited to the character of the plant as the foolish little dwarf Sweet Peas, that are only wilfully wanton, freakish distortions of a beautiful and graceful plant, whose duty it is to climb and bring its pretty blooms up to the level of our admiring eyes and appreciative noses. A good strong

from the picture in the possession of

MRS. HUTH]

soil is shown by the well-being of the White Lily and Phlox, Sweet Williams and double Scarlet Potentilla. Carnations are largely grown in the borders; the great Orange Lily (L. croceum) has just given place to the White; Canterbury Bells are in grand masses, and the sturdier plants are interspersed with graceful fragilities, such as the long-spurred yellow Californian Columbine.

To the left of the alcove an archway cut in the yew hedge leads to the bowling-green. This also is inclosed and sheltered by yew hedges. There is a terrace all round, from which it is pleasant to watch the game. Next to this, and following along the line of the yew hedge, is a square inclosure of turf, with a few clipped yews. This is a kind of ante-room to the rose-garden. High walls of yew are all around except to this garden, where they are low and shaped. The middle space of the rose-garden has beds concentrically arranged, leaving spandrils of beds of other shape. At the end is a garden-house, and a wide way out to lawn spaces with fine trees and flowering shrubs. A broad gravel walk at the boundary of the lawn, with a wide grass outer verge and the knee-high top of the wall of a sunk fence, that separates it from the park, leads leftwards to the house. From this walk there is a very beautiful view across the steeply-falling gradient of the park to the lake. The park has grand old oak trees that fall into picturesque groups. Beyond the lake again are fine masses of timber. The lake is a sheet of water that takes a winding course and disappears among the trees.

The kitchen-garden walls are interesting survivals of an old way of treating fruit-trees. They are three feet thick and honeycombed with flues for heating. It was a clumsy and unmanageable expedient practised in the days before the circulation of water in pipes heated from one boiler was understood. The modern orchard-house is much more convenient and its working absolutely under control.

The kitchen garden lies between the house and the newer gardens that have been described. The maze should not be forgotten. It is at the back of the alcove and the bowling-green. These old garden toys are very seldom planted now. Perhaps people have not time for them. Also they are costly of labour; the area of green wall of a maze of even moderate size, that has to be clipped yearly, if computed would amount to an astonishing figure. Now that the possibilities of other forms of garden delight are so much widened, it is small wonder that the maze should have fallen into disuse. It must have been amusing in the older days when people’s lives were simpler and more leisured; but there are puzzles and difficulties enough in our more complicated days, and the influences that we now want in a garden are soothing tranquillities rather than bewildering perplexities. Near the maze and alcove is a group of three great Lombardy Poplars that tells with extremely fine effect from many parts of the garden.

On one side of the house is an old parterre of the kind now but seldom seen out of Italy; with elaborate scrolls and arabesques of clipped box; the more characteristically Italian form of the “knotted” gardens of our Tudor ancestors. The English patterns were much nearer akin to those used so lavishly on gala clothing in the form of needlework of cording and braiding, and the strap-work of wood-carving, while the Italian parterre designs were drawn more freely in flowing lines and less rigid forms.

Opposite the porch is a sundial, supported by a kneeling figure of a black slave, of the same design as the one in the gardens of the Inner Temple, that was formerly at Clement’s Inn, and is known as the “Blackamoor.” Like this one the figure is of lead.

from the picture in the possession of

MRS. APPLETON]

LADY COVENTRY’S NEEDLEWORK

This is a pretty Midland name for the good garden plant commonly called Red Valerian, or Spur Valerian (Centranthus ruber), that groups so well in the picture with the straw-thatched beehives. How the name originated cannot be exactly stated, but may easily be inferred. There are several estates in the Midland Counties belonging to the Coventry family, and, bearing in mind what we know of the home life of our great-great-grandmothers of the late eighteenth century, it may be assumed that some Lady Coventry of that date was specially fond of the pretty needlecraft so widely practised among the ladies of that time.

Delightful things they are, these old needlework pictures, with a character quite different from that of their predecessors of Jacobean times. These were much stiffer in treatment and usually had figures; a lady and gentleman and a dog being usual subjects, and trees looking like those out of a Noah’s Ark, no doubt interpretations of the stiffly-cut yew and box trees of the gardens of the same times.

But the workers of the flower-pictures of a hundred years later, and into the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for the most part chose flowers alone for their subjects. Sometimes a drawing was made, but many of them look as if they were worked direct from the flowers. It would appear that the worker would begin in the spring, with a Hyacinth; then would come Anemones, Tulips, Auriculas, Lilac, Roses and Lilies; a jumble of seasons but a concord of pretty things, and all done with a simplicity, a sweetness, a directness of intention and absence of strain or affectation, that give them a singular charm. One such picture that I have before me must have been begun in May, and finished, perhaps, in August and September; for the first flower in the upper left-hand corner, where the work would naturally begin, is a thyrse of Lilac, and the last, low down on the right, is a Nasturtium; while the intermediate flowers, following each other in what would be approximately their natural sequence, come in between. These are Pansy, Rose, Sweet Pea, Love-in-a-Mist, Lily, Larkspur, Convolvulus, Carnation, Jasmine and Passion-flower; and one Daisy-shaped flower, whose identity, considering the numbers of possible Composites and the somewhat vague manner of the rendering, cannot be determined, though all the other flowers are capitally done and could not be mistaken.

The disk of the Daisy-flower is worked in a mass of those little knots that sit closely together, the secret of whose making is known to every good needlewoman. They are a capital direct imitation of the group of anthers in the centre of a flower.

The glory of the picture, and what was evidently the delight of the worker, is the Love-in-a-Mist, which stands above the others in the middle top of the picture. The tender blue of the flower, shading to white, the sharply-jagged edges of the petals, the green upstanding forms in the centre, and, above all, the fennel-like divisions of the involucre and the leaves, all lend themselves to satisfactory portrayal with the needle; while the prominent position given to this charming midsummer flower shows how the worker rejoiced in its beauty and took pleasure in painting its form and colour in tender stitchery upon the white silken ground of her picture. The Jasmine flowers, too, are done with evident enjoyment as well as the neat, clear-cut leaves. The Rose is a Moss-Rose, shown in three stages of bud and half-blown bloom, when this charming Rose is at its best; the mossiness of the calyx being cleverly suggested by short straw-coloured stitches that catch the light upon a ground of dull green. The working material is floss silk, whose silvery, shining surface, dark in some lights, makes a distinct effect of light and shade in the case of the white flowers, even though they are worked upon a ground that is also white.

Sometimes these pictures are of a bunch of flowers without a receptacle, but often there is a basket or vase. In this case there is a basket of very simple form, standing on a darker table worked in the chenilles, which were also much used. They are tiny ropes of silk velvet with an effect of rich short pile, like the old velvets of Genoa.

It is easy to see how the Red Valerian came to be used as a model for needlework. Short stitches and long would easily render the small divisions of the calyx and the long slender spur and single pistil, and a quantity of this, representing the rather crowded flower-head, would have a very good effect on a white or light ground.

The plant itself is a pretty one in any garden. Botanists say that it is not indigenous, but it has taken to the country and acclimatised itself, and now behaves like a native; haunting quarries and railway cuttings in the chalk. It is a capital plant for establishing on or in walls or bold rockwork, as well as in the garden border. It is always thankful for chalk or lime in any form.

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.

London & Edinburgh