GARDEN HOUSE IN OLD ENGLISH GARDEN
"Overlooking the garden is the Terrace—twenty or thirty feet wide—of considerable length, and protected by a balustrade of detached banisters, of handsome design pierced in stone. From the Terrace wide flights of steps at either end lead to the broad sanded walks that divide the parterre into several subdivisions, which are again divided by narrow paths into smaller designs.
"The general shape is square, following the antique classical garden of Pliny's time, enclosed with trellis-work, espaliers, clipped box-hedges, statuary, fountains, vases, and pleached alleys."
The famous Nonsuch, near Ewell, in Surrey, laid out by Henry VIII toward the end of his life, retained its appearance for more than a hundred years; for at the time of the Parliamentary Survey (1650) it was thus described:
"It was cut out and divided into several allies, quarters and rounds, set about with thorn hedges; on the north side is a kitchen garden, very commodious and surrounded with a brick wall of fourteen feet high. On the west is a wilderness severed from the little park by a lodge, the whole containing ten acres. In the privy garden were pyramids, fountains and basins of marble, one of which is set round with six lilack trees, which trees bear no fruit, but a very pleasant flower. Before the Palace is a neat and handsome bowling-green surrounded with a balustrade of freestone."
Hampton Court Gardens, so beautiful to-day, were very famous in Tudor times. The old manor house was at the southwest corner of the area, and around it Cardinal Wolsey laid out his gardens and orchards. In 1599 Henry VIII seized the estate and enlarged the gardens. Ernest Law exclaims:
"What a truly delightful picture must these gardens have formed with their little walks and parterres, sheltered arbors and banquetting-houses. The largest plot was called the King's New Garden and occupied the place called the Privy Garden. Here were the gay parterres with gravel paths and little raised mounds with sun-dials on them. Here was also the Pond Garden, which is still to be seen and which, though much altered, yet retains something of its Tudor aspect; and another, known as the Little Garden, which may, perhaps, be identified with the enclosed space at the side of the Pond Garden. Studded about in various parts of the gardens and orchards were heraldic beasts on pedestals, holding vanes, or shields, bearing the King's Arms and badges; also many brass sun-dials."
Another typical garden was that of Kenilworth, known, of course, to Shakespeare, as it is in Warwickshire:
"His Honor's the Earl of Leicester's exquisite appointment of a beautiful garden, an acre or more in quantity, that lieth on the north. Whereon all along the Castle wall is reared a pleasant terrace, ten feet high and twelve feet broad, even under foot and fresh of fine grass, as is also the side, thereof, towards the garden, in which, by sundry equal distances with obelisks and spheres and white bears all of stone upon their curious bases by goodly shew, were set. To these, two fine arbors, redolent by sweet trees and flowers, at each end, one; the garden-plot under that, with fair alleys, green by grass, even voided from the borders on both sides, and some (for change) with sand, smooth and firm, pleasant to walk on, as a sea-shore when the water is avoided. Then much gracified by due proportion of four even quarters, in the midst of each upon a base of two feet square and high, seemingly bordered of itself, a square pilaster rising pyramidically fifteen feet high."
Thus Robert Laneham wrote in a letter describing the pageant at Kenilworth in 1575.