Garden-Craft Old and New

by John Dando Sedding

or in a "Musical Dreame"—

"Now wend we home, stout Robin Hood,
Leave we the woods behind us.
Love passions must not be withstood,
Love everywhere will find us.
I livde in fielde and downe, and so did he;
I got me to the woods, love followed me."

or shall we hear tell from Chaucer how

"When that Aprille, with his showrës swoot
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,

Then longen folk to gone on pilgrimages."

Or hear from Stowe how the cockney of olden days "In the month of May, namely, on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk in the sweet meddowes and green woods, ther to rejoyce their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers and with the harmonie of birds praysing God in their kinde."

Or shall we turn to Shakespeare's bright incidental touches of nature-description as in Perdita's musical enumeration of the flowers of the old stiff garden-borders "to make you garlands of," or the Queen's bit in "Hamlet," beginning

"There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream."

Or to the old Herbals of Wyer, and Turner, and Gerard, whom Richard Jefferies[14] pictures walking about our English lanes in old days? "What wonderful scenes he must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs and the curious customs, and the wild red-deer—it would make a good picture, it really would, Gerard studying English orchids!"

Or shall we take down the classic volumes of Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Cowley, Isaak Walton, Gilbert White, each in his day testifying to the inborn love of the English for woodland scenery, their study of nature, and their taste in trees, shrubs, and flowers. What a vindication is here of the old-fashioned garden and gardener! What nonsense to set up Kent and Brown as the discoverers of the green world of old England, when, as Mr Hamerton remarks in "The Sylvan Year" (p. 173), Chaucer hardly knows how or when to stop whenever he begins to talk about his enjoyment of Nature. "Chaucer," he says, "in his passion for flowers, and birds, and spring mornings in the woods, and by streams, is hard to quote, for he leads you down to the bottom of the page, and over the leaf, before you have time to pause."