No sound anywhere, on this lovely July day, greeted me, but the trilling jubilation of a thrush in a lilac, so I could dream on at will about gardens and their delights. After a while my mind wandered to the gardens of the ancients. I thought of those deep groves where Epicurus walked and talked, of the rose-laden bowers where Semiramis feasted and reposed, of the moonlit gardens where Solomon sung his Oriental rhapsodies, where fountains played day and night, and in which hundreds of trees flowered and fruited.
Where were the gardens of “the Hesperides?” I asked myself. That spot of wonderful delight which none ever wished to leave, where flowers blossomed all the year, and where fair nymphs danced and sang through all the seasons.
Then where was the garden of Alcinous, where the trees formed a dark and impenetrable shade, where fountains refreshed the weary and where fruit followed fruits in endless succession?
With us in England, a garden means a place of joyous sunlight, a place where flowers glitter in the sunshine, and where throughout the day feathered songsters sing in joyous chorus. In the Oriental imagination, a garden means cool alleys, flowing water, marble basins; a place to wander in beneath the stars, and to hear the nightingale sing his chant of melody and grief. Even in the matter of gardens, the aspirations of the West must always be different from those of the East. Then my mind turned to the gardens of fancy.
“Where sprang the violet and the periwinkle rich of hue”—where “all the ground was poudred as if it had been peynt, and where every flower cast up a good savour.” Where amongst the trees “birdis sang with voices like unto the choir of angels, where sported also little conyes, the dreadful roo, the buck, the hert, and hynde, and squirrels, and bestes small of gentil kynde.” Where sweet musicians played, and where, as Chaucer wrote, with the naiveté of the early poets, that God who is Maker and Lord of all good things, he guessed, never heard sweeter music, “where soft winds blew, making sweet murmurs in the green trees, whilst scents of every holsom spice, and grass were wafted in the breeze.”
Then in the peace of that exquisite summer day, I saw as in a dream that blest region which Sir Philip Sidney has painted and called Arcadia, “where the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, where nightingales sung their wrong-caused sorrow;” where the hills rose, their proud heights garnished with stately trees, beneath which silver streams murmured softly amidst meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers. Where pretty lambs with bleating outcry craved their dam’s comfort, and where a shepherd-boy piped as though he never could grow old, whilst a shepherdess sang and knitted all the while, so that it seemed “that the voice comforted her hands to work, and the hands kept time to the voice music.”
In that sweet and happy country, where light and sun and blue sky were constant joys, where the houses were all scattered, “but not from mutual succour,” where the joys of “accompanable solitariness were to be found combined with the pleasures of civil wildness,” I allowed my fancy to linger.
Then as butterflies flitted past in all the pomp of summer splendour in my Abbey garden, I thought for a moment of Mistress Tuggy’s bowers of passion-flower at Westminster, of which Gerard wrote, and of which he told us “there was always good plenty.” I thought also of that gay procession to the Parson of Tittershall, where merry maids went, bearing with them garlands of red roses, and of that wreath laid through many centuries, in beautiful Tong Church.
I liked to imagine Theobalds, where it was said a man might wander two miles and yet never come to the end of the great gardens; or to think of that great pleasaunce of Frederick, Duke of Würzburg, where it was said that it was easy for a stranger to lose his way, so vast was the space of the enclosure.
ELIZABETHAN GARDENS