Ruskin Relics

by W. G. Collingwood

RUSKIN'S RESERVOIR, BRANTWOOD

Over the bridge and within the wood there were frequent hummocks and bosses of rock pushing through the soil, and each with its special interest of fern or flower. Many a visitor must have recalled or repeated—

Who loved the little rock, and set
Upon its head the coronet?

while Ruskin led the way, pointing out each trail of ivy (convolvulus not allowed for fear of strangling the stems) and nest of moss, as a gardener of the other species might point out his orchids. Then suddenly forth of the wood you came upon the tennis-lawn—another concession to youthful visitors, for he played no athletic games. But in the creation of this glade he took the keenest delight, believing, as he said, in diggings of all sorts. He was the engineer, and the work was done in great part by the young people who were to play tennis on the ground when it was levelled—a rather distant hope, but eventually fulfilled. The tall, thin saplings have run up higher and higher all round the green: on one side you look through their veil to the long expanse of lake; on the other, up the dark, wooded hill; and on a sunny afternoon it has a curious touch of poetry. There is no statue on a pedestal or fountain playing in a basin, but on the mossy bank, beneath the graceful lines of virginal forestry, Decamerons might have been told. It is an oasis in the North-country farmer's neighbourhood, this Lake district which the tripper thinks just "country" as God made it, quoting Cowper, and not dreaming of the "native's" view that the land is an unroofed mutton-factory, with every inch of it "proputty, proputty, proputty."

I do not mean to imply that Ruskin's gardening was wilfully anti-utilitarian. The charm of it was that it brought the natural advantages and local usages into a new light, with just the refinement of feeling which made a flight of steps into a rock-garden and a tennis-ground into a Purist painter's glade. Who but he would have planted his field with narcissus, scattered thinly among the grass, to surprise you with a reminiscence of Vevey? And in the old garden below, though he did not create it, you can trace his feeling in the terraced zigzag of paths, hedged with apple and the cotoneaster which flourishes at Coniston, and filled in with sloping patches of strawberry and gooseberry. The average proprietor would have levelled his walks and capped his dwarf walls with flat slabs. This irregularity and cottage-garden business would have offended those new-comers who buy a bit of nature at the Lakes and improve away all its beauties.

It was in the late 'seventies, when the first illness had forced him to spend most of his time at Brantwood, and in the early 'eighties, before final illness put an end to his activity, that Ruskin, having completed his woodland paths and gardens, and all the "diggings" at his harbour, went higher up the hill for new worlds to conquer. His bit of moor above the wood was opened out into a new sort of garden, quite as charming in its way as any other. It was a steep patch of hillside grandly overlooking the lake, with a foreground of foliage below and a background of mountains above; but as Nature left it—or rather as Nature made it after the original wild growth of oak and birch and holly had been cleared away by the charcoal-burners and sheep-farmers of past centuries. Strongly marked ridges of slate-rock cropped out slantwise, across and across the slope, their backs tufted over with heather and juniper, and their hollows holding water in sodden quagmires. Down the slope, from the bogs of the great moor behind, rising to a thousand feet above the sea in some places, there were two little streamlets which leapt the ridges and pooled in the hollows among ferns and mosses. All the green fields and farms of the dalesmen were once made out of such ground, and many of them at quite as great a height; indeed the actual elevation of this plot nowhere reaches five hundred feet. The problem was to take advantage of whatever useful features the site afforded without destroying its native charm. To drain and clear an intake and put it under grass, or to plant it outright, had been done before; but that was to do away with the moorland character altogether. Just as a portrait-painter studies to pose his sitter in such a light and in such an attitude as to bring out the most individual points and get the revelation of a personality, so Ruskin studied his moor, to develop its resources.

RUSKIN'S MOORLAND GARDEN