except in the shade. The people, even the nobles, who built these gardens, were lovers of the outdoors and had a great deal of homely common-sense knowledge of the processes of agriculture and gardening. The laborers who actually did the work of construction and maintenance had been for generations on the same land. They were slow, conservative, and trained in definite and practical ways of doing their work. The designs of these estates were usually the work of the owners, helped it may be by some one of more trained taste, or realizing on their own land some memory of designs which they had seen in France and Italy, but in any case adapting their means to their ends with a very practical recognition of the influence of local material and individual use. Decorative flower beds they doubtless had in early days, and flowers against the walls of the houses and in protected places, grown for their sweet scent and for their bright colors in a dull atmosphere where bright color is particularly to be desired, and where the moisture is favorable to their luxuriant growth. The garden of sweet herbs, the garden of simples, was as often as not a part of the same scheme as the garden of flowers. The smooth texture of velvety turf with the shade of great free-standing trees gave beauty and dignity to their grass terraces and to the level expanses of bowling-greens and lawns for archery. There were pleached arbors and alleys for shady walks and for outdoor resting-places. The same workmanlike but fanciful use of the materials of stone and brick which give the buildings of the period much of their charm appeared also in the walls, steps, and balustrades of the gardens as, for instance, at Montacute House. Water in pools was used sometimes purely for decoration but more often served also the practical purpose of a fish pond. An old device was still common, the mount, whence a man might look not only over his own inclosed gardens but out across the countryside. The grounds were arranged for outdoor living and active use, and their designers drew no hard and fast line between such areas as might be considered as entirely decorative and such as were in part at least devoted to economic purposes. The separate areas immediately about the dwelling were for the most part formal, but the garden with its walks and hedges, the terrace with its curious knots of flowers, were designed each for itself, and there was little attempt at any relation of these areas in a general formal scheme tending to one effect, except in so far as the separate areas lay one next another surrounding the house. The Elizabethan pleasure garden * was an outgrowth of the earlier manner of English gardening, enriched by ideas from abroad, but still distinctly a national style, with its roots in its native soil. But as the riches of the greater land-holders increased, as they became more familiar with the customs of other courts and with the growing splendor of the gardens of Italy and France, and the quaint conceits of the Dutch, imitations of the styles of these countries displaced on many estates the older English work. Later, as we have seen, the landscape school arose, destroyed much of the preceding work of whatever kind, produced the deadly monotony of "Capability" Brown, the puerilities of the later Romantic landscape work, and settled to the soberer sense of Repton. From Repton's time to within the last quarter century there has been little new landscape design in England worthy of much serious attention by a student of style; but within recent years there has been a revival of the studied planning of gardens truly English in expression ‡ which has produced work not widely different from that of Elizabethan times. This is largely of course because the modern designers are intentionally holding fast to that which has come down to them from the past, but partly, too, it is because the modern work is based, as was the old work, on the character of the people and of the country, and is continuing a tradition which, though overlaid from time to time with other styles, has persisted since before the Tudor times down to the present day. (See Drawing VI, opp. p. 48, and Drawing XX, opp. p. 158.) The cottages have had their gardens in England as surely as have The English the castles, and in the cottage gardens the natural conditions produced Cottage Style a similarity of appearance worthy of the name of a style more certainly than was the case in the larger gardens, because no seeking of novelty * See the chapter on the Elizabethan garden in The Hon. Alicia Amherst's A History of Gardening in England. (See REFERENCES.) † See, for instance, the views of Penshurst and Knole given in Macartney's English Houses and Gardens in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. (See REFERENCES.) See the work of Mr. Lutyens as illustrated in Lawrence Weaver's The Houses and Gardens of E. L. Lutyens, London, "Country Life," 1914. E The New England Colonial Style for the sake of display, no transitory style of another country, interfered with the unconscious but definite working out of these forces. The makers of these cottage gardens were poor and forced to consider the practicality of everything they did. They were tenacious of tradition, home-loving, dwelling in the same holding for generation after generation, each man adding his little, as circumstances allowed, to what he received from his father and planned to leave to his son. The gardens were placed close about the houses to be easy of cultivation; they were small, hedged in, fitted to the topography, making careful use of local opportunities and local materials, often given over largely to the growth of vegetables, with the flowers perhaps lining their walks or filling in odd corners by the door of the house, and with roses and flowering vines covering the walls, the gate, and even clambering over the roof of the house itself. The choice of local material for the house as well as for the outlying walls, the use of thatch or thick and irregular slate on the roof, the closeness of adaptation of the house and its dependencies to the ground (see Drawing XXIV, opp. p. 192), which comes from gradual growth and the natural unwillingness of the poor man to undertake any avoidable excavation or construction, the rich enshrouding of ivy growing untouched for centuries, and the exuberance of hardy flowering plants, protected but not restrained, - all tend to make the typical English cottage with its garden almost in itself a natural object,* something so largely the work of time and so little the conscious design of man as to be hard to imitate under other circumstances, but still an excellent source of inspiration to any one who is seeking to make a smaller building and its grounds and the surrounding landscape all parts of one composition. (See Drawing VII, opposite.) Many of the early Pilgrims and Puritans left just such cottages and cottage gardens as we have been discussing when they came from the old England to the New. Their first permanent houses were as like those to which they were accustomed as it was possible for them to build from the somewhat unaccustomed materials at hand. * See the illustrations in books on English cottages such as Ditchfield's Picturesque English Cottages and their Doorway Gardens (1905), Dawber and Davie's "Old Cottage" books for Cotswold, Kent, etc., published by Batsford, or Old English Country Cottages, edited by Charles Holme, published by "The Studio," 1906. |