Two of the most celebrated gardens of those days were Nonsuch and Cobham. Nonsuch seems to have had a number of statues, and a wonderful fountain, with Diana and Actæon; and its lilac-trees are particularly mentioned. Of Cobham, in Kent, then belonging to Lord Cobham, but now to Lord Darnley, Holinshed says, “No varietie of strange flowers and trees do want, which praise or price maie obtaine from the furthest part of Europe or from other strange countries, whereby it is not inferior to the Garden of Semiramis.” A little later, Lord Fairfax’s garden at Nun-Appleton was glorified by Andrew Marvell. It was built, as was supposed to be appropriate for a soldier’s garden, in the form of a fort with five bastions, and
“the flowers as on parade
Under their colours stand displayed,
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulip, pink, and rose.”
Later on still (in 1685) Sir William Temple, in his celebrated essay, described the gardens in his day as not often exceeding six or eight acres, enclosed by walls, and “laid out in a manner wholly for advantage of fruits, flowers, and the product of kitchen gardens.” He goes on to say, that
“In every garden four things are necessary to be provided for, flowers, fruit, shade and water, and whoever lays out a garden without all these must not pretend to any perfection. It ought to lie to the best parts of the house, so as to be but like one of the rooms out of which you step into another. The part of your garden next your house (besides the walls that go round it) should be a parterre for flowers, and grass-plots bordered with flowers; or if, according to the newest mode, it be cast all into grass-plots and gravel walks, the dryness of these should be relieved with fountains, and the plainness of those with statues.”
He then quotes the garden at Moor Park, made by the Countess of Bedford, as “the perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw.” He says, “the length of the house, where the best rooms or of most use or pleasure are, lies upon the breadth of the garden:” the “great parlour” opens upon a broad terrace walk, and then three flights of steps descend to a very large parterre, with its standard laurels, its fountains, and its statues. This garden must obviously have been a garden of an architectural rather than of a horticultural character, and was not at all the ordinary garden of the ordinary country house. But the garden, which we properly associate with those described by the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the garden “enclosed by walls,” within which were flower-beds and herb and kitchen gardens, divided by flowering shrubs, and green walks, and verdant alleys. It was in such a garden that Spenser’s butterfly met its untimely end, and such were
“The gardens of Adonis, fraught
With pleasures manifold.”
It was in the “pleached bower” of such a garden, where the ripe honeysuckles obscured the sun, that Shakespeare’s Beatrice was to hide. Of such a garden Andrew Marvell was thinking when he described the lilies and roses, on which Sylvio’s fawn was wont to feed. In these old gardens Cowley wrote his essays; and Herrick gathered the fancies of a poet, or the warnings of a moralist, with his early violets and fading daffodils.
And so, with but few changes, these Elizabethan gardens grew on from year to year, till a certain modification occurred when William III. introduced a taste for whatever was characteristic of Holland: statues were fewer, and hedges of box or yew, clipped into fantastic shapes, became all the fashion. These clipped hedges, indeed, were no new invention, as Sir Walter Scott appears to have thought, for Bacon had denounced them. He did “not like images cut out in juniper or other garden stuff, they be for children.” Earlier still, Leland, in his Itinerary, speaks of the Castle of Wrexhill, and says that outside “the mote” were orchards, and “in the orchards were mountes opere topiario.”[2]
But the most famous specimen of Topiarian work in England is probably that at Levens Hall in Westmoreland. It was the work of Beaumont, a well-known gardener of his day, and dates from 1701, the last year of William III.’s reign. Colonel Graham was at that time owner of Levens, and some curious letters from his steward still exist, describing the laying-out of the grounds and the planting of the yews, of which one group was clipped into the shape of Queen Elizabeth with her maids of honour.
Long rows of trees, moreover, were now formed on the several sides of great houses, and at Cobham (the varied fortune of whose garden is singularly instructive) a semicircle of trees was planted near the west front, from which radiated five avenues. But the Dutch fashions and the Topiarian work and the long avenues were to be of no long duration. It is more than probable that political feeling, as well as mere fashion, may have had something to do with the change in many cases; but, however this may be, those who set themselves up as men of taste began to find fault with the existing style. Pope was among the first to discover that there was a monotony when grove nodded to grove and each alley had its brother, and he insisted that nature must “never be forgot,” and that one must “consult the genius of the place in all.” So he set to work to consult the genius of his own villa at Twickenham, and this genius certainly prevented anything monotonous. He had flower-beds, and slopes, and mounds, and vistas, and a cypress-grove, and a shell-temple, and an orangery, and a bowling-green, and, above all, a wonderful grotto, “finished with shells, and interspersed with pieces of looking-glass in angular forms.”