The Charm of Gardens

by Dion Clayton Calthrop

Such little houses were copied from the Eastern idea, such as is pointed to several times in the Bible. The Shunamite gives such a house to Elisha:

“Let us make him a little chamber, I pray thee, with walls; and let us set him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick, that he may turn in thither when he cometh to us.”

Whether a Roman living in England ever built himself such a house it is difficult to prove, since, so far as I can find, no remains of such a place are to be seen. But, when one considers the actual evidence of the Roman Occupation, the yields given by the neighbourhoods of Roman cities, the statues, vases, toys, the amphitheatres for cock-fighting, wrestling, and gladiatoral combat, then surely there were gardens of great wonder near to these cities where men like Pliny went to sit in their garden houses and enjoyed the cool of the evening after a day’s work.

I have always made it a fancy of mine to suppose such an apartment to have stood on the spot where a garden house I know now stands. I have sat in this little house, a tiny place compared to Pliny’s, and pictured to myself the surrounding country as it might have looked under the eyes of our Roman conquerors. Not far distant is a Roman town, outside which is a huge amphitheatre; the Roman road, via Iceniana, cutting through the western downs and forests. Over this very countryside were villas scattered here and there, bridges, walls, moats and camps. Even to-day, not far away from my summer-house, are two small Roman bridges, over which, in my day-dreams, the previous occupier of the site has often passed.

Here, from this summer-house, I look upon an apiary, a bed of Violets, a little wood that gives shelter to the birds, a running stream where trout leap in the pools. My Roman friend, had he built his house here, would have looked, as I look, at green meadows, and across them to a wild heath on which rise the very mounds he must have known, British earthworks, and the heap-up burial places of great British chiefs. Round about the house grow many flowers that would seem homely to my ghostly friend, Roses, Lilies, Narcissi, Violets, Poppies. Here he might have sat and contemplated, as Pliny did, and taken his pleasure of the sun, the wind, the birds. The sea he could not have heard, since it is eight miles away, but he could well have seen storms come up over the western downs, known that the Roman galleys were seeking shelter in the coves and harbours, and noticed how the gulls flew screaming inland, and the Egyptian swallows flew low before the coming tempest.

This house that I know is a simple affair, compared to the elaborate design of Pliny’s; it is a small thatched single apartment built in the elbow of the garden wall. It is not tuned to trap the sun, or dull the sounds of the violence of the winds, but its solitary window opens wide to let in the sound of the bees at work, the thrush singing in the Lilac tree, or tapping his snails on a big stone by the side of the garden path. It has a shelf for books, two chairs, a writing table, and an infinity of those odds and ends a person collects who deals with bees. Withal it is pervaded by a very sweet smell of honey.

Then there are ghosts for company if the books, the birds, and the bees fail. There is my Roman to speak for his villa, for the glories of the town near by. There is the British chieftain whose mound is not two miles away, a mound where his charred ashes lie, but the urn that held them is on a shelf overhead. There are Saxons who have trod this very ground, and Danes and Normans, men also from Anjou, Gascony, and Maine, and a host of others. Then there are the flowers themselves with romances every one.

If I have a mind to following fancy and turn this into a veritable Roman garden, I can link my fancy with Pliny’s facts and see how it would have been ordered and arranged. I can see the villa portico with its terrace in front of it adorned with statues and edged with Box. Below here is a gravel walk on each side of which are figures of animals cut in Box. Then there is the circus at the end of a broad path, where my Roman friend could exercise himself on horseback. Round about the circus are sheared dwarf trees, and clipped Box hedges. On the outside of this is a lawn, smooth and green. Then comes my summer-house shaded with Plane trees, with a marble fountain that plays on the roots of the trees and the grass round them. There would be a walk near by covered with Vines, and ended by an Ivy-covered wall. Several alleys (my imagination has traced their courses) wind in and out to meet in the end of a series of straight walks divided by grass plots, or Box trees cut into a thousand shapes; some of letters forming my Roman’s name; others the name of his gardener. In these are mixed small pyramid Apple trees; “and now and then (to follow Pliny’s plan) you met, on a sudden, with a spot of ground, wild and uncultivated, as if transplanted hither on purpose.” Everywhere are marble or stone seats, little fountains, arbours covered with Vines, and facing beds of Roses, or Violets, or Herbs, and always is to be heard the pleasant murmur of water “conveyed through pipes by the hand of the artificer.”

The more I think of it the more I see how exactly the garden I know fulfils this purpose. Except for a greater, a far greater display of flowers, Pliny would be quite at home here. There is an abundance of water; the very site for the horse course; winding alleys, straight paths, and several pergolas for Roses.

A noticeable thing in the planning of a Roman garden, and one that is too often absent from our own, is the great attention paid to the value of water. In many places where there is an abundant supply of water, with streams running close by, or even through the garden, we find no attempt made to use the value of water either decoratively or for useful purposes. We are apt to dispose our gardens for the purposes of large collections of flowers, whereas the Roman with his small store of them was forced to bring every aid to bear on varying his garden, such as seats, fountains, and little artificial brooks. The cost, even in small gardens, of arranging a decorative effect of water, where water is plentiful, would not amount to so very much, and in many cases would be a great saving of labour. We use wells to some extent, and, to my mind, a properly-built well-head, with a roof and posts, and seats, is one of the most beautiful garden ornaments we can have.