It was at this point that I began to think about improvements, and the first essay in this direction was obvious. I had the rubbish removed, the ground made straight, a stone sundial placed in the centre, and a Dutch pattern of flower-beds cut around it.
On the coping of the walls—they were only six feet high on our side, but forty on the culside—I placed lead and stone vases and a balustrade of wrought iron-work. I made an immense window in the wall of the potting-shed—a single sheet of plate-glass with four small casements of heraldic stained glass; and then the old potting-shed I panelled in coloured marbles, designed a sort of domed roof for it and laid down a floor in mosaics. I had in my mind a room in the Little Trianon in all this; and I meant to treat the view outside as a picture set in one wall. Of course I did not altogether succeed; but I have gone sufficiently far to deceive more than one visitor. Entering the room through a mahogany door set with a round panel of beautifully-clouded onyx—once a table-top in the gay George's pavilion' at Brighton—a visitor sees the brass frame of the large window enclosing the picture of the Barbican, the Gateway, and the Keep, and it takes some moments to understand it.
All this sounds dreadfully expensive; but through finding a really intelligent builder and men who were ready to do all that was asked of them, and, above all, through having abundance of material collected wherever it was going at shillings instead of pounds, I effected the transformation at less than a sixth of the lowest assessment of the cost made by professional friends. To relieve myself from any vain charge of extravagance, I may perhaps be permitted to mention that when the property was offered for sale in London a week before I bought it, not a single bid was made for it, owing to an apparent flaw in one of the title-deeds frightening every one off. Thus, without knowing it. I arrived on the scene at the exact psychological moment—for a purchaser; and when I got the place I found myself with a considerable sum in hand to spend upon it, and that sum has not yet been all spent. The bogey fault in the title was made good by the exchange of a few letters, and it is now absolutely unassailable.
It must also be remembered by such people as may be inclined to talk of extravagance, that it is very good business to spend a hundred pounds on one's property if the property is thereby increased in value by three hundred. I have the best of all reasons for resting in the assurance that for every pound I have spent I am three to the good. There is no economy like legitimate expenditure.
I wonder if real authorities in garden design would think I was right in treating after the Dutch fashion the little enclosed piece of ground on which I tried my prentice hand.
In order to arrive at a conclusion on this point I should like to be more fully informed as to what is congruous and what incongruous. What are the important elements to consider in the construction of a Dutch garden, and are these elements in sympathy with the foreground of such a picture as I had before me when I made up my mind on the subject?
Now I have seen many Dutch gardens in Holland, and in Cape Colony—relics of the old Dutch Colonial days—and every one knows how conservative is this splendid if somewhat over-hospitable race. Some of the gardens lying between Cape Town and Simon's Bay, and also on the higher ground above Mossel Bay are what old-furniture dealers term “in mint condition”—I disclaim any suggestion of a pun upon the herb, which in Dutch houses at the Cape is not used in sauce for lamb. They are as they were laid out by the Solomons, the Cloetes, the Van der Byls, and the other old Dutch Colonial families; so far from adapting, themselves to the tropical and subtropical conditions existing in the Colony, they brought their home traditions into their new surroundings with results that were both happy and profitable. There are certainly no finer or more various bulbs than those of Dutch growth at the Cape, and I have never seen anything more beautiful than the heaths on the Flats between Mowbray and Rondesbosch at the foot of the Devil's Peak of Table Mountain.
