LEVENS: ROSES AND PINKS
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF Mrs. Archibald Parker
those especially of tall stature making a fine effect. The Rose garden has White Pinks in its outer beds. Immediately beyond the garden’s bounds is wild ground of a beautiful character. The river Kent, a rock-strewn stream with steep wooded banks, flows within fifty yards of the house. The contrast is a great and a delightful one. Wild parkland and untamed river without; and within the walls ordered restraint; then again, the quiet of the wide bowling-green, with its dark clipped hedges, and beyond it a long, tree-shaded walk.
Precious, indeed, are the few remaining gardens that have anything of the character of this wonderful one of Levens; gardens that above all others show somewhat of the actual feeling and temperament of our ancestors. They show personal discrimination combining happily with common-sense needs; walls and masses of yew and box to make shelter from the violence of wind, and yet to admit the welcome sunlight; so to provide the best conditions in the inner spaces for the growing of lovely flowers. Then the shaping of some of the yews into strange forms, shows perhaps the whimsical humour of some one of a line of owners, preserved, with careful painstaking, by his descendants.
A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the minds of several of such possessors—men who have not only thankfully paced its green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have held it in that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure to be some living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, or its beauty. The original design may have become in some degree lost, but unless the doings of the several owners have been in the way of destruction or radical alteration, or something of obvious folly or bad taste, the garden will have gained in a remarkable degree that quality of human interest that is not easy to define but that is clearly perceptible, not only to a trained critic but to any one who has knowledge of its most vital needs and sympathy with its worthiest expression. This precious utterance is not confined to this or to any one special kind of gardening, but may pervade and illuminate almost any one of the many ways in which men find their pleasure and delight in ordering the sheltered seclusion of their home grounds, and enjoying the varied beauty of tree and bush and flower.
It is only in gardens of the most rigidly formal type, such as are full of architectural form and detail and admit of no alteration of the original plan, that personal influence can least be exercised. This is no doubt the reason why such gardens, correctly beautiful though they may be, are those that give in smallest measure that wonderful sense of the purest and most innocent happiness, that of all earthly enjoyments seems to be the most directly God-given.
Yet, even in such gardens, it is not impossible that some impress of the personal influence may be beneficently given, but the range of operation is extremely limited, the greatest knowledge and ability are needed, with the sure action of the keenest and most restrained judgment.