One of the greatest ornaments to a garden is a fountain, but many fountains are curiously ineffective. A fountain is most beautiful when it leaps high into the air, and you can see it against a background of green foliage. To place a fountain among low flower-beds, and then to substitute small fancy jets, that take the shape of a cup, or trickle over into a basin of gold-fish, or toy with a gilded ball, is to do all that is possible to degrade it. The real charm of a fountain is, when you come upon it in some little grassy glade of the “pleasaunce,” where it seems as though it sought, in the strong rush of its waters, to vie with the tall boles of the forest-trees that surround it. Such was the fountain in Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, which shot up “beneath a shade of darksome pines,”
“And ’twixt their shafts you saw the water bright,
Which through the tops glimmered with show’ring light.”
Bacon speaks of a “heath or desert” as a part of the garden, and says it is “to be framed as much as may be to a natural wilderness.” There are to be no trees there, but thickets of honeysuckle and other trailing plants, and heaps like molehills, set with pinks or periwinkles, or violets, or various “sweet and sightly” flowers, and on some of the heaps little bushes of juniper or rosemary, or other low-growing shrubs, are to be planted. Such a garden would hardly seem to be one of “natural wildness”; but Bacon’s theory that there should be a “wild garden” is, with certain modifications, carried out in various places. But to cultivate a wild garden almost involves a paradox. The plants should grow of their own accord, and as their vagrant fancy takes them. The prettiest of all wild gardens is when the bluebells are so thick that they seem a reflection of the sky, or the celandine lies in sunny patches on a bank, or the primrose and violet come up here and there at the foot of old forest-trees. Sometimes, too, less common flowers, which have been planted years ago, and have spread as it has pleased them, give an effect of even greater beauty. We remember one large shrubbery all blue with hepaticas, and another golden with the winter aconite. Other plants, such as the anchusa or the Petasites fragrans, may be trusted to take care of themselves, and are well worth some half-wild corner. On the other hand, it is not well to attempt to grow native plants when the conditions of their new life would be unfavourable. It is almost sad to see some bee-orchis, or grass of Parnassus, or mountain auricula, or other rare British plant, transplanted into a shrubbery border. It is far better to leave these “wildings of nature,” as Campbell calls them, in their native haunts, and to experience for oneself a new pleasure in finding them growing wild and vigorous on down, or bog, or hilly slope. Occasionally a garden flower which has sprung up from some stray seed will add a certain unexpected charm to a walk or grass plot. Such flowers are in a sense weeds no doubt, but “weeds of glorious feature,” and there are few who, like Lady Byron—and the story is characteristic—would at once order the gardener to uproot them. One beautiful form of semi-wild garden is where, on some piece of rich peat soil, rhododendrons have been thickly planted. There is a fine example of this at Knowsley, where thousands of large shrubs are growing in the greatest luxuriance, and where, as the slight irregularity of the ground permits, you pass between banks and slopes and hollows, quite purple with the clustered blossoms.
It is of course impossible to lay down any code of rules which would be equally applicable to every garden. As I have already said, there will always be a certain amount of bedding-out necessary, especially for the architectural gardens that surround a stately house; but we may hope that in all bedding-out more attention will be given than at present to the proper harmony of colours. It really would sometimes appear that half our English gardeners must be colour-blind. The gaudiest and most glaring contrasts pain instead of gratifying the eye, with their crude patches of pink and red and blue and yellow. In France the bedded-out borders have more generally a variety of plants mixed on the same bed, and this certainly tends to soften the general effect.
But both in the outside lawns and shrubberies, and in the walled inner garden, there is much room for improvement. A great principle in laying out the lawns is the old principle of Batty Langley’s (a principle which he himself parodied rather than illustrated) of so arranging your grounds that everything cannot be seen at once, and that each turn of the walks excites some fresh interest. The curved lines of a shrubbery, now approaching and now receding, the grass running up into little bays and recesses among deodaras and groups of rhododendrons, specimen trees occasionally breaking a formal line, but never dotted about at regular intervals,—these are the features that lend attraction to a lawn. We would allow of no flower-bed whatever except the shrubbery border, though an occasional clump of tritomas, of cannas, or of Pampas grass, may take the place of flowering shrubs, and start up from corners of the grass. Their height and general aspect enables them to form part of the picture. But—one cannot repeat it too often—the expanse of the lawn should be rarely broken except by shrubberies; and that the lawn itself should be carefully kept and free from weeds is of course essential.
One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had every advantage in the soft climate of the west of England. The various lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you wandered on from one to the other, and always came on something new. In front of these shrubberies was a large margin of flower border, gay with the most effective plants and annuals. At one corner of the lawn a standard Magnolia grandiflora of great size held up its chaliced blossoms; at another a tulip-tree was laden with hundreds of yellow flowers. Here a magnificent Salisburia mocked the foliage of the maiden-hair; and here an old cedar swept the grass with its huge pendent branches. But the main breadth of each lawn was never destroyed, and past them you might see the reaches of a river, now in one aspect, and now in another. Each view was different, and each was a fresh enjoyment and surprise.
A few years ago, and I revisited the place; the “improver” had been at work, and had been good enough to open up the view. Shrubberies had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together. The pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had become open spaces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to be seen. Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained numberless rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the lawn in front of the house was cut up into little beds of red pelargoniums, yellow calceolarias, and the rest.
But we have now to speak of the shrubbery. It will depend on its situation whether or not it is backed by forest-trees, but in any case it will have a certain number of evergreens in front. To plant evergreens alone is generally a mistake. Horace Walpole says that he was “not fond of total plantations of evergreens,” and he was certainly right. Shrubberies composed entirely of holly, yew, and pinus must inevitably have a solid, heavy appearance, and their use in winter barely compensates for their melancholy monotony during the summer months. They should, wherever it is possible, have deciduous flowering shrubs planted in among them. Nothing can be prettier than to see the dark shades of the evergreens lighted up by the fresh tender green of lilac or laburnum, while, later in the season, the background of evergreen will in its turn give effect to the purple plumes and golden tresses. But there is great art in the laying out of shrubberies and the arrangement of the shrubs. There is the time of flowering to be considered, and no less the various colours of the blossoms, while (very occasionally it is true) the tints of the leaves, as they first expand, or are touched by the chills of autumn, and even the prevailing tone of bark and branches, are studied, so that there may be always some happy effect of colouring. But for the most part all this is neglected. There are very few gardeners who pay the attention they should to the shrubbery, and still fewer owners of gardens who care to interfere in the matter. A pinetum has of late years become something of a fashion, and is therefore often a subject of interest, but the shrubbery and the shrubbery border are scarcely regarded. Lilacs and laburnums, scarlet thorns, and rhododendrons are very beautiful; but to confine our flowering shrubs to these implies either want of knowledge or want of taste. There are numbers besides, perfectly hardy, or only requiring some slight protection in the winter, which are comparatively but little known. Even many old favourites have been allowed to become unfamiliar. The white and yellow broom, the Ghent azaleas (excepting perhaps the yellow one), the barberry with its bunches of golden blossom and coral fruit, the Buddleia with its glaucous leaves and honeyed balls like tiny oranges, the Gueldres rose covered with its large white tufts of snow, the scarlet ribes with its brisk scent of black currant, are not to be seen as often as they once were. The Judas-tree (Cercis), whose little clusters of pink pea-blossom come out so early in the year, and the bladder-senna, whose curious paper-like bags of seed, hanging late on in autumn, burst as you press them with a sharp report, are still more rarely to be found. Of later introductions the Weigelia alone seems to hold its own, but the Desfontainea spinosa, looking like a holly, but throwing out scarlet and yellow tubes of blossom, or the diplopappus, with its leaves like a variegated thyme, and its flowers like a minute aster, are hardly ever seen. But there are many more as good as these.
For covering a house the large magnolia is perhaps more beautiful than anything. The perfume of its white flowers, though too strong for the house, fills the air for yards round, and comes in stray whiffs through the open window. This magnolia will flourish abundantly in most places, and if it does not, it is probably owing to its roots requiring to be cabined, cribbed, and confined. Other good shrubs for the outside of the house are the ceanothus, the escallonia, and the cydonia or Pyrus japonica, and these two last are well worth growing as independent shrubs. The Pyrus japonica, moreover, when trained as a hedge, and breaking out all along its twisted stems into knots of cherry-coloured blossom, is extremely beautiful.
And in the more favoured nooks of England greenhouse shrubs, such as camellias and cytisus, may be seen to flourish and flower abundantly in the open air. There is a striking example of this as far north as the Anglesea side of the Menai Straits. Thirty years ago Sir John Hay Williams determined to build a house and form a garden on a steep field sloping down to the water’s edge. The excessive steepness of the ground made it necessary to construct a number of supporting walls to form terraces; and the entire plan was carried out by the owner without any professional assistance. Huge fuchsias, myrtles, the Fabiana imbricata, and other beautiful flowering shrubs grow up against the house, and, sheltered by a terrace-wall, are magnificent camellias and cytisus. I once saw this garden of Rhianva under rather remarkable circumstances. It was the Sunday (March 24, 1878) when the ill-fated Eurydice went down. The snow-storm came on, and the snow-flakes fell heavily on the red and white camellias, which were then in great perfection. An hour later, and the sun was again shining, the snow was melting away, and the blossoms appeared from beneath it as fresh as if nothing had occurred.