Q CHAPTER VI DECLINE OF THE FORMAL, AND EARLY INDICATIONS OF THE WANSTEAD, the noble seat of Sir Richard Child, with the DANIEL finest gardens in the world. You descend from the Salon DEFOE (1663-1731). into the parterre, which hath a Canal in the middle; on the right a wilderness, and on the left a fine green walk, which ends in a banqueting house. On one side of this green walk stands the green-house, finely adorned with statues, and uncommonly furnished with greens: while behind this green-house are variety of highhedged walks, affording delicious vistas. At the bottom of the canal is a bowling-green encircled with grottos and seats, with antique statues between each seat; this bowling-green is separated by a balustrade of iron from another long green walk, which leads you to another long canal. On Richmond Green is a fine house and gardens, made by Sir Charles Hedges, but now belonging to Sir Matthew Decker, which are very curios. The longest, largest, and highest hedge of holly I ever saw is in this garden, with several other hedges of evergreens, vistas cut through woods, grottos with fountains, and a fine canal running up from the river. His duckery, which is an oval pond bricked round, and his pretty summer-house by it, in which to drink a bottle, his stove houses, which are always kept of an equal heat for his citrons and other Indian plants, with gardeners brought from foreign countries to manage them, are very curious and entertaining. Sutton Court is une bijoux; it hath three parterres from the Sutton Court. three fronts of the house, each finely adorned with statues. The Durdans. gardens are irregular, but that, I think, adds to their beauty, for every walk affords variety; the hedges, grottos, statues, mounts, and canals, are so many surprising beauties. There are several very good seats in and about Epsom. That of Lord Guildford, called Durdans, at the extremity of the village, was built by the Earl of Barclay out of the materials of Nonsuch, a royal palace in this neighbourhood, built by Henry VIII., and given by King Charles II. to the Duchess of Cleveland, who pulled it down and sold the materials. This house of Durdans is built a-la-moderne of free-stone; the front to the garden, and that to the Downs, are very noble; the apartments within are also very regular, and in the garden is the most charming grove imaginable; famous for that scene of love between Lord Grey and his lady's sister, which you have read of. Cannons. The parterre fronting the west is separated from the great avenue, and the great court leading to the great staircase by balustrades of iron, as it is also from the gardens on the other side. There is a large terrace walk, from whence you descend to the parterre; this parterre hath a row of gilded vases on pedestals on each side down to the great canal, and in the middle fronting the canal, is a gladiator, gilded also; through the whole parterre, abundance of statues as big as the life, are regularly disposed. The canal runs a great way, and indeed one would wonder to see such a vast quantity of water in a country where are neither rivers or springs; but they tell me that the Duke hath his water in pipes from the mountains of Stanmore, abou two miles off. The gardens are very large and well disposed but the greatest pleasure of all is that the divisions of the whole, being only made by balustrades of iron and not by walls, you see the whole at once, be you in what part of the garden or parterre you will.-A Journey through England and Scotland in 1714. His own Professional gardener and seedsman in the reign of Anne and George 1., and for several years a pupil of London and Wise, under the former of whom he was employed in 1706 in laying out the grounds at Blenheim. garden was at Milbank. (See G. W. Johnson's History of English Gardening,' for a long analysis of his chief work' Ichnographia Rustica.') IF a little Regularity is allow'd near the main Building and as soon as the Designer has stroke out by Art some of the roughest and boldest of his strokes, he ought to pursue Nature afterwards, and by as many Twinings and Windings as his Villa will allow, will endeavour to diversify his Views, always striving that they may be so intermixt, as not to be all discover'd at once; but that there should be as much as possible, something appearing new and diverting, while the whole should correspond together by the magic Error of its natural Avenues and Meanders. . . . And to the End that he may know the better, how to make the best use of natural Advantage, he ought to make himself Master of all Rural Scenes: And the Writings of the Poets on this Subject, will give him considerable Hints, for in Design the Designer as well as the Poet should take as much Pains in forming his Imagination, as a Philosopher in cultivating his Understanding.-Ichnographia Rustica, 1742 (first edition 1718). I STEPHEN SWITZER (1665-1745). I JONATHAN WISH I were just now in my little garden at Laracor. would set out for Dublin early on Monday and bring you an account of my young trees, which you are better acquainted with than the ministry, and so am I. It is now high cherry time with us; take notice is it so soon with you? And we have early apricots; and gooseberries are ripe. (Kensington, July 1, 1712.) 1 Swift had an odd humour of making extempore proverbs. Observing that a gentleman, in whose garden he walked with some friends, seemed to have no intention to request them to eat any of the fruit, Swift observed, 'It was a saying of his dear grandmother, Always pull a peach When it is within your reach'; and helping himself accordingly, his example was followed by the whole company.-Sir W. Scott: Memoirs of Jonathan Swift. Pray why don't MD go to 'Trim, and see Laracor, and give me an account of the garden, and the river, and the holly and the cherry-trees on the river-walk.-Journal to Stella. JOSEPH SIR,-Having lately read your essay on The Pleasures of the ADDISON Imagination, I was so taken with your thoughts upon (1672-1719). some of our English gardens, that I cannot forbear troubling you with a letter upon that subject. I am one, you must know, who am looked upon as a humourist in gardening. I have several acres about my house, which I call my garden, and which a skilful gardener would not know what to call. It is a confusion of kitchen and parterre, orchard and flower-garden, which lie so mixt and interwoven with one another, that if a foreigner, who had seen nothing of our country, should be conveyed into my garden at his first landing, he would look upon it as a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated parts of our country. My flowers grow up in several parts of the garden in the greatest luxuriancy and profusion. I am so far from being fond of any particular one, by reason of its rarity, that if I meet with any one in a field which pleases me, I give it a place in my garden. By this means, when a stranger walks with me, he is surprised to see several large spots of ground covered with ten thousand different colours, and has often singled out flowers he might have met with under a common hedge, in a field, or in a meadow, as some of the greatest beauties of the place. The only method I observe in this particular, is to range in the same quarter the products of the same season, that they may make their appearance together, and compose a picture of the greatest variety. There is the same irregularity in my plantations, which run into as great a wilderness as their natures will permit. I take in none that do not naturally rejoice in the soil; and am pleased, when I am walking in a labyrinth of my own raising, not to know whether the next tree I shall meet with is an apple or an oak; an elm or a pear tree. My kitchen has likewise its particular quarters assigned it; for besides the wholesome luxury which that place abounds with, I have always thought a kitchen garden a more pleasant sight than the finest orangery, or artificial greenhouse. I love to see everything in its perfection: and am more pleased to survey my rows of coleworts and cabbages, with a thousand nameless pot-herbs, springing up in their full fragrancy and verdure, than to see the tender plants of foreign countries kept alive by artificial heats, or withering in an air and soil that are not adapted to them. I must not omit, that there is a fountain rising in the upper part of my garden, which forms a little wandering rill, and administers to the pleasure as well as the plenty of the place. I have so conducted it that it visits most of my plantations; and have taken particular care to let it run in the same manner as it would do in an open field, so that it generally passes through banks of violets and primroses, plats of willow or other plants, that seem to be of its own producing. There is another circumstance in which I am very particular, or, as my neighbours call me, very whimsical; as my garden invites into it all the birds of the country, by offering them the conveniency of springs and shades, solitude and shelter, I do not suffer any one to destroy their nests in the Spring, or drive them from their usual haunts in fruit-time; I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. By this means I have always the music of the season in its perfection, and am highly delighted to see the jay or the thrush hopping about my walks, and shooting before my eye across the several little glades and alleys that I pass through. I think there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry: your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages and cascades, are romance writers. Wise and London are our heroic poets; and if, as a critic, I may single out any passage of their works to commend, I shall take notice of that part in the upper garden at Kensington, which was at first nothing but a gravel pit. It must have been a fine genius for gardening, that could have thought of forming such an unsightly hollow into so beautiful an area, and to have hit the eye with so uncommon |