The holly hedges that back the borders are old and solid. Their top line, shaped like a flat-pitched roof, is ornamented at intervals with mushroom-shaped finials, each upon its stalk of holly stem. The grass walk and double border pass right across the kitchen garden in the line of its longest axis. At the furthest end there is another pair of the same handsome gate-piers with a beautiful wrought-iron gate, leading into the park. The park is handsomely timbered, and in early summer is especially delightful from the great number of fine old hawthorns.
In Lady Henry’s time several borders in the kitchen garden were made bright with annuals and other flowers. Such borders are very commonly used for reserve purposes, such as the provision of flowers for cutting, with one main double border for ornament alone. But where gardens are being laid out from the beginning, such a plan as this at Bulwick, of a grass path with flower borders and a screening hedge at the back, passing through a kitchen garden, is an excellent one, greatly enlarging the length of view of the pleasure garden, while occupying only a relatively small area. It is also well in planning a garden to provide a reserve space for cutting alone, of beds four feet, and paths two feet wide, and of any length suitable for the supply required. This has the advantage of leaving the kitchen garden unencumbered with any flower-gardening, and therefore more easy to work.
Such a long-shaped garden is also capable of various ways of treatment as to its edge, which need not necessarily be an unbroken line. The length of the border in question is perhaps a little too great. It might be better, while keeping the effect of a quiet line, looking from end to end, to have swung the edge of the border back in a segment of a circle to a little more than half its depth, every few yards, in such a proportion as a plan to scale would show to be right; or to have treated it in some one of the many possible ways of accentuation where the cross paths occur that divide it into three lengths. The thinking out of these details according to the conditions of the site, the combining of them into designs that shall add to its beauty, and the actual working of them, the mind meanwhile picturing the effect in advance—these are some of the most interesting and enlivening of the many kinds of happiness that a garden gives.
Be it large or small there is always scope for inventive ability; either for the bettering of something or for the casting of some detail into a more desirable form. Every year brings some new need; in supplying it fresh experience is gained, and with this an increasing power of adapting simple means to such ends as may be easily devised to the advancement of the garden’s beauty.
BRAMHAM
The gardens at Bramham in Yorkshire, laid out and built near the end of the seventeenth century, are probably the best preserved in England or the grounds that were designed at that time under French influence. Wrest in Bedfordshire, and Melbourne in Derbyshire of which some pictures will follow, are also gardens of purely French character.
It is extremely interesting to compare these gardens with those of a more distinctly Italian feeling. Many features they have in common; architectural structure and ornament, close-clipped evergreen hedges inclosing groves of free-growing trees; parterres, pools and fountains. Yet the treatment was distinctly different, and, though not easy to define in words, is at once recognised by the eye.
For one thing the French school, shown in its extremest form by the gardens of Versailles, dealt with much larger and more level spaces. The gardens of Italian villas, whether of the Roman Empire or of the Renaissance, were for the most part in hilly places; pleasant for summer coolness. This naturally led to much building of balustraded terraces and flights of steps, and of parterres whose width was limited to that of the level that could conveniently be obtained. Whereas in France, and in England especially, where the country house is the home for all the year, the greater number of large places have land about them that is more or less level and that can be taken in to any extent.
At Bramham the changes of level are not considerable, but enough to furnish the designer with motives for the details of his plan. The house, of about the same date as the garden, was internally destroyed by fire in the last century. The well-built stone walls still stand, but the building has never been restored. The stables and kennels are still in use, but the owner, Captain Lane-Fox, lives in another house on the outskirts of the park. The design of the gardens has often been attributed to Le Nôtre, and is undoubtedly the work of his school, but there is nothing to prove that the great French master was ever in England.
The way to the house is through a large, well-timbered park. Handsome gate-piers with stone-wrought armorial ornament lead into a forecourt stretching wide to right and left. A double curved stairway ascends to the main door. To the left of the house is an entrance to the garden through a colonnade. Next to the garden front of the house, which faces south-west, is a broad gravelled terrace. The ground rises away from the house by a gently sloping lawn, but in the midmost space is a feature that is frequent in the French gardening of the time, though unusual in England: a long theatre-shaped extent of grass. There is a stone sundial standing on two wide steps near the house, and a gradually heightened retaining wall following the rise of the ground. Not more than two feet high where it begins below, and there accentuated on either side by a noble stone plinth and massive urn, the retaining wall, itself a handsome object of bold masonry, follows a straight line for some distance, and then swings round in a segmental curve to meet the equal wall on the further side; thus inclosing a space of level sward. Midway in the curve, where the wall is some twelve feet high, there appear to have been niches in the masonry, possibly for fountains.