Several new ideas were introduced into English gardens in the first quarter of the Sixteenth Century. About 1525 the geometrical beds called "knots" came into fashion, also rails for beds, also mounds, or "mounts," and also arbors. Cardinal Wolsey had all these novelties in his garden at Hampton Court Palace. It was a marvelous garden, as any one who will read Cavendish may see for himself; but Henry VIII was not satisfied with it when he seized the haughty Cardinal's home in 1529. So four years later the King had an entirely new garden made at Hampton Court (the Privy Garden is on the site now) with gravel paths, beds cut in the grass, and railed and raised mounds decorated with sun-dials. Over the rails roses clambered and bloomed and the center of each bed was adorned with a yew, juniper, or cypress-tree. Along the walls fruit-trees were planted—apples, pears, and damsons—and beneath them blossomed violets, primroses, sweet williams, gilliflowers, and other old favorites.

Toward the end of his reign Henry VIII turned his attention to beautifying the grounds of Nonsuch Palace near Ewell in Surrey. These gardens were worthy of the magnificent buildings. A contemporary wrote: "The Palace itself is so encompassed with parks full of deer, delicious gardens, groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of verdure and walks so embowered with trees that it seems to be a place pitched upon by Pleasure herself to dwell in along with health."

V
New Fad for Flowers

An example of a typical Tudor estate, Beaufort House, Chelsea, later Buckingham House, is said to have been built by Sir Thomas More in 1521 and rebuilt in 1586 by Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who died in 1615. The flowers at this period were the same for palace and cottage. Tudor gardens bloomed with acanthus, asphodel, auricula, anemone, amaranth, bachelor's buttons, cornflowers or "bottles," cowslips, daffodils, daisies, French broom (genista), gilliflowers (three varieties), hollyhock, iris, jasmine, lavender, lilies, lily-of-the-valley, marigold, narcissus (yellow and white), pansies or heartsease, peony, periwinkle, poppy, primrose, rocket, roses, rosemary, snapdragon, stock gilliflowers, sweet william, wallflowers, winter cherry, violet, mint, marjoram, and other sweet-smelling herbs.

During "the great and spacious time" of Queen Elizabeth there was an enormous development in gardens. The Queen was extremely fond of flowers and she loved to wear them. It must have pleased her hugely when Spenser celebrated her as "Eliza, Queen of the Shepherds," and painted her portrait in one of the pretty enclosed gardens, seated among the fruit-trees, where the grass was sprinkled with flowers:

See where she sits upon the grassy green,
O seemly sight!
Yclad in scarlet, like a Maiden Queen,
And ermines white;
Upon her head a crimson coronet,
With daffodils and damask roses set;
Bay leaves between,
And primeroses green,
Embellish the sweet violet.

So fond was the Queen of gardens that Sir Philip Sidney could think of no better way to please her than to arrange his masque of the "May Lady" so that it would surprise her when she was walking in the garden at Wanstead in Essex. Then, too, in 1591, when visiting Cowdry, Elizabeth expressed a desire to dine in the garden. A table forty-eight yards long was accordingly laid.

The Tudor mansions were constantly growing in beauty. Changes and additions were made to some of them and many new palaces and manor-houses were erected. Architects—among them John Thorpe—and landscape gardeners now planned the pleasure-grounds to enhance the beauty of the mansion they had created, adapting the ideas of the Italian Renaissance to the English taste. The Elizabethan garden in their hands became a setting for the house and it was laid out according to a plan that harmonized with the architecture and continued the lines of the building. The form of the garden and the lay-out of the beds and walks were deemed of the greatest importance. Flowers, also, took a new place in general estimation. Adventurous mariners constantly brought home new plants and bulbs and seeds from the East and lately discovered America; merchants imported strange specimens from Turkey and Poland and far Cathay; and travelers on the Continent opened their eyes and secured unfamiliar curiosities and novelties. The cultivation of flowers became a regular fad. London merchants and wealthy noblemen considered it the proper thing to have a few "outlandish" flowers in their gardens; and they vied with one another to develop "sports" and new varieties and startling colors.

Listen to what an amateur gardener, William Harrison, wrote in 1593:

"If you look into our gardens annexed to our houses how wonderfully is their beauty increased, not only with flowers and variety of curious and costly workmanship, but also with rare and medicinable herbs sought up in the land within these forty years. How Art also helpeth Nature in the daily coloring, doubling and enlarging the proportion of one's flowers it is incredible to report, for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now in these days that they presume to do in manner what they list with Nature and moderate her course in things as if they were her superiors. It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane, Canary Isles and all parts of the world.