The balustrade in the picture is old, probably of the same date as the house; much of the other stonework is modern. The circular seat on a raised platform, with its stone-edged flower-beds, has a very happy effect, and its yew-hedge backing joins well into the older yews that
CONDOVER: THE TERRACE STEPS
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
Miss Austen Leigh
overlap the parapet of the steps; their colour contrasting distinctly with that of the more distant Ilex, a magnificent example of a tree that deserves more general use in English gardens. The parterre above the steps and on a level with the house has box hedges, after the Italian manner, three feet high and two feet wide. These, with some of the yew hedges, were planted a hundred years ago, though much of the garden, with its ornaments of fine Italian flower-pots, was the work of the former owner, the late Mr. Reginald Cholmondeley, a man of powerful personality and fine taste.
The most important part of the garden lies to the west of the house, where there is a double garden of stiff pattern with high box borders and clipped evergreens. At a right angle to this, the spectator, standing at some distance westward, and looking back towards the east and straight with the space between the pair of gardens of angular design, sees a broad space flanked on either side by a row of handsome upright yews. The ground between is a flower garden of large diamond-shaped beds in two sizes, with cleverly-arranged green edgings. But now that the large Irish yews have grown to their early maturity, dominating the garden and insisting on their own strong parallel lines, it is open to question whether it would not have been better to have had a wide, clear middle space of green straight down the length, with the flowers in shapely, ordered masses to right and left. The close succession of large beds gives the impression of impediments to comfortable progress.
It was wise to leave the Irish yews unclipped. Though the common English yew is the tree that is of all others the most docile to the discipline of training and shearing, the upright growing variety will have none of it. In some fine English gardens they are clipped, always with disastrous effect. They will only take one form: that of an ugly swollen bottle, or lamp-chimney with a straight top. Their own form is quite symmetrical enough for use in any large design.