BLYBOROUGH: HOLLYHOCKS
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF Mr. C. E. Freeling
of the extreme value of personal effort combined with knowledge and good taste.
These qualities may operate in different gardens in a hundred varying ways, but where they exist there will be, in some form or other, a delightful garden. Endless are the possibilities of beautiful combinations of flowers; just as endless is their power of giving happiness and the very purest of human delight. So also the special interest of different gardens that are personally directed by owners of knowledge and fine taste would seem to be endless too, for each will impress upon it some visible issue of his own perception or discernment of beauty.
About the house and lawns are other beds and borders of herbaceous flowers of good grouping and fine growth; conspicuous among them is that excellent flower Campanula pyramidalis, splendidly grown.
Though Blyborough is in a cold district, it has the advantage of lying well sheltered below a sharply-rising ridge of higher land.
GREAT TANGLEY MANOR
Forty years ago, lying lost up a narrow lane that joined a track across a wide green common, this ancient timber-built manor-house could scarcely have been found but by some one who knew the country and its by-ways well. Even when quite near, it had to be searched for, so much was it hidden away behind ricks and farm-buildings; with the closer overgrowth of old fruit trees, wild thorns and elders, and the tangled wastes of vegetation that had invaded the outskirts of the neglected, or at any rate very roughly-kept, garden of the farm-house, which purpose it then served.
What had been the moat could hardly be traced as a continuous water-course; the banks were broken down and over-grown, water stood in pools here and there; tall grass, tussocks of sedge and the rank weeds that thrive in marshy places had it all to themselves.