CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

It was when a gardener with whom I had never exchanged a cross word during the two years he was with me assured me that work was not work but slavery in my garden—he had one man under him and appealed to me for a second—that I made my apology to him and allowed him to take unlimited leave of me and his shackles. He had been with me for over two years, and during all this time the garden had been going from bad to worse. At the end of his bondage it was absolutely deplorable. At no time had we the courage to ask any visitor to walk round the grounds.

And yet the man knew the Latin name of every plant and every flower from the cedar on the lawn to the snapdragon—he called it antirrhinum—upon the wall; but if he had remained with me much longer there would have been nothing left for him to give a name to, Latin or English.

I took over the garden and got in a boy to do the pot-washing at six shillings a week, and a fortnight later I doubled his wages, so vast a change, or rather, a promise of change, as was shown by the place. Within a month I was paying him fifteen shillings, and within six months, eighteen. He was an excellent lad, and in due time his industry was rewarded by the hand of our cook. I parted with him reluctantly at the outbreak of the war, though owing to physical defects he was never called up.

It was when I was thrown on my own resources after the strain of leave-taking with my slave-driven professor that I acquired the secret of garden design which I have already revealed—namely, the multiplying of “features” within the garden space.

It took time for me to carry out my plans, for I was very far from seeing, as a proper garden designer would have done in a glance, how the ground lent itself to “features” in various directions; and it was only while I was working at one part that the possibilities of others suggested themselves to me. It was the incident of my picking up in a stonemason's yard for a few shillings a doorway with a shaped architrave, that made me think of shutting off the House Garden, which I had completed the previous year, from the rest. I got this work done quite satisfactorily by the aid of a simple balustrade on each side. Here there was an effective entrance to a new garden, where before nothing would grow owing to the overshadowing by the sycamores beyond my mound. My predecessor took refuge in a grove of euonyma, behind which he artfully concealed the stone steps leading to the Saxon terrace. This was one of the “features” of his day—the careful concealing of such drawbacks in the landscape as stone steps. Rut as I could not see that they were after all a fatal blot that should put an end to all hope to make anything of the place, I pulled away the masses of euonyma, and turned the steps boldly round, adding piers at the foot.

Here then was at my command a space of forty feet square, walled in, and in the summer-shade of the high sycamores, and the winter-shade of a beautifully-shaped and immense deciduous oak. And what was I to do with it?

Before I left the interrogatory ground I saw with great clearness the reflection of the graceful foliage in a piece of water. That was just what was needed at the place, I was convinced—a properly puddled Sussex dew-pond such as Gilbert White's swallows could hardly resist making their winter quarters as the alternative to that long and tedious trip to South Africa. The spot was clearly designed by Nature as a basin. On three sides it had boundaries of sloping mounds, and I felt myself equal to the business of completing the circle so that the basin would be in its natural place.

I consulted my builder as to whether or not my plan was a rightly puddled one—which was a way of asking if it would hold water in a scientific as well as a metaphorical sense. He advised concrete, and concrete I ordered, though I was quite well aware of the fact that in doing so I must abandon all hopes of the swallows, for I knew that with concrete there would be none of that mud in the pond which the great naturalists had agreed was indispensable for the hibernating of the birds.

A round pond basin was made, about fifteen feet in diameter, and admirably made too. In the centre I created an island with the nozzle of a single jet d'eau, carefully concealed, and by an extraordinary chance I discovered within an inch or two of the brim of the basin, the channel of an ancient scheme of drainage—it may have been a thousand years old—and this solved in a moment the problem of how to carry off the overflow. The water was easily available from the ordinary “Company's” pipe for the garden supply; so that all that remained for me to do was to tidy up the ground, which I did by getting six tons of soft reddish sandstone from a neighbouring quarry and piling it in irregular masses on two sectors of the circular space, taking care to arrange for a scheme of “pockets” for small plants at one part and for large ferns at another. The greatest elevation of this boundary was about fifteen feet, and here I put a noble cliff weighing a ton and a half, with several irregular steps at the base, the lowest being just above a series of stone rectangular basins, connected by irregular shallow channels in a descent to the big pond. Then I got a leaden pipe with an “elbow” attachment to the Company's water supply beneath, and contrived a sort of T-shaped spray which I concealed on the level of the top of my cliff, and within forty-eight hours I had a miniature cascade pouring over the cliff and splashing among the stone basins and the ir channels—“per averpace coi seguaci sui”—in the large pond below.

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Of course it took a summer and a winter to give this little scheme a chance of assimilating with Nature; but once it began to do so it did so thoroughly. The cliff and the rocky steps, which I had made in memory of the cascade at Platte Klip on the side of Table Mountain where I had often enjoyed a bath, became beautifully slimy, and primroses were blooming so as to hide the outlines of the rectangle, while Alpines and sedums and harts-tongue ferns found accommodation in the pockets among the stones. In the course of another year the place was covered with vegetation and the sandstones had become beautifully weathered, and sure enough, the boughs of the American oak had their Narcissus longings realised, but without the Narcissus sequel.

Here, then, was a second “feature” accomplished; and we walk out of the sunshine of the House Garden, and, passing through the carved stone doorway, find ourselves in complete shade with the sound of tinkling water in the air—when the taps are turned in the right direction; but in the matter of water we are economical, and the cascade ceased to flow while the war lasted.

I do not think that it is wrong to try to achieve such contrasts in designing a range of gardens. The effect is great and it will never appear to be cheap, provided that it is carried out naturally. I do not think that in a place of the character of that just described one should introduce such objects as shrubs in tubs, or clipped trees; nor should one tolerate the appearance for the sake, perhaps, of colour, of any plant or flower that might not be found in the natural scene on which it is founded. We all know that in a rocky glen we need not look for brilliant colour, therefore the introduction of anything striking in this way would be a jarring note. To be sure I have seen the irrepressible scarlet geranium blazing through some glens in the island of St. Helena; but St. Helena is in the tropics, and a tropical glen is not the sort to which we have become accustomed in England. If one has lived at St. Helena for years and, on coming to England, wishes to be constantly reminded of the little island of glens and gorges and that immense “combe” where James Town nestles, beyond a doubt that strange person could not do better than create a garden of gullies with the indigenous geranium blazing out of every cranny. But I cannot imagine any one being so anxious to perpetuate a stay among the picturesque loneliness of the place. I think it extremely unlikely that if Napoleon I. had lived to return to France, he would have assimilated any portion of the gardens of Versailles with those that were under his windows at Longwood. I could more easily fancy his making an honest attempt to transform the ridge above Geranium Valley on which Longwood stands—if there is anything of that queer residence left by the white ants—the natural owners of the island—into a memory of the Grand Trianon, only for the “maggior dolore” that would have come to him had such an enterprise been successful.

My opinion is that a garden should be such as to cause a visitor to exclaim,—

“How natural!” rather than, “How queer!”

A lake may be artificial; but it will only appear so if its location is artificial; and, therefore, in spite of the fact that there are countless mountain tarns in Scotland and Wales, it is safest for the lake to be made on the lowest part of your ground. I dare say that a scientific man without a conscience could, by an arrangement of forced draught apparatus, cause an artificial river to flow uphill instead of down; but though such a stream would be quite a pleasing incident of one of the soirees of the Royal Society at Burlington House, I am certain that it would look more curious than natural if carried out in an English garden ground. The artificial canals of the Dutch gardens and of those English gardens which were made to remind William III. of his native land, will look natural in proportion to their artificiality. This is not so hard a saying as it may seem; I mean to say that if the artificial canal apes a natural river, it will look unnatural. If it aims at being nothing but a Dutch canal, it will be a very interesting part of a garden—a Dutch garden—plan, and as such it will seem in the right and natural place. If a thing occupies a natural place—the place where you expect to find it—it must be criticised from the standpoint of its environment, so to speak, and not on the basis of the canons that have a general application.

And to my mind the difference between what is right and what is wrong in a garden is not the difference between what is the fashion and what is not the fashion; but between the appropriate and the inappropriate. A rectangular canal is quite right in a copy of the Dutch garden; but it would be quite wrong within sight of the cascades of the Villa d'Este or any other Italian garden. Topiary work is quite right in a garden that is meant frankly to be a copy of one of the clipped shrubberies of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century that preceded landscape treatment, but it is utterly out of place in a garden where flowers grow according to their own sweet will, as in a rosery or a herbaceous border. A large number of people dislike what Mr. Robinson calls “Vegetable Sculpture,” and would not allow any example to have a place on their property; but although I think I might trust myself to resist every temptation to admit such an element into a garden of mine, I should not hesitate to make a feature of it if I wanted to be constantly reminded of a certain period of history. It would be as unjust to blame me on this account as it would be to blame Mr. Hugh Thomson for introducing topiary into one of his exquisite illustrations to Sir Roger de Coverley. I would, I know, take great pleasure in sitting for hours among the peacocks and bears and cocked hats of the topiary sculptor, because I should feel myself in the company of Sir Roger and Will Wimble, and I consider that they would be very good company indeed; but I admit that I should prefer that that particular garden was on some one else's property. I should spend a very pleasant twenty minutes in. a neighbour's—a near neighbour's—reproduction of the grotto at Pope's Villa at Twickenham, not because I should be wanting in a legitimate abhorrence of the thing, but because I should be able to repeople it with several very pleasant people—say, Arbuthnot, Garth, and Mr. Henry Labouchere. But heaven forbid that I should spend years of my life in the construction of a second Pope's grotto as one of the features of my all-too-constricted garden space.

One could easily write a book on “Illustrating Gardens,” meaning not the art of reproducing illustrations of gardens, but the art of constructing gardens that would illustrate the lives of certain interesting people at certain interesting periods. The educational value of gardens formed with such an intent would be great, I am sure. I had occasion some time ago to act the part of their governess to my little girls, and to Dorothy's undisguised amazement I took the class into the garden, and not knowing how to begin—whether with an inquiry into the economic value of a thorough grounding in Conic Sections, or a consideration of the circumstances attending the death of Mary Queen of Scots—I have long believed that a modern coroner's jury would have found that the cause of death was blood poisoning, as there is no evidence that the fatal axe was aseptic, not having been boiled before using—I begged the girls to walk round with me.

“This is something quite new,” said Rosamund—“lessons in a garden.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Did Miss Pinkerton ever tell you about a man named Plato?”

It was generally admitted that if she had ever done so they would have remembered the name.

I saw at once that this was a chance that might not occur again for me to recover my position. The respect that I have for Miss Pinkerton is almost equal to that I have for Lemprière or Dr. Wilkam Smith.

I unfolded like a philaetery the stores of my knowledge on the subject of the garden of Academus, where Plato and his pupils were wont to meet and discover—

“How charming is divine philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed as some fools affirm,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,”

and the children learned for the first time the origin of the name Academy. They were struck powerfully with the idea, which they thought an excellent one, of the open-air class.

This was an honest attempt on my part to illustrate something through the medium of the garden; but Miss Pinkerton's methods differed from those of Plato: the blackboard was, in her opinion, the only medium of illustration for a properly organised class.

It was a daily delight to me when I lived in Kensington to believe that Addison must have walked through my garden when he had that cottage on the secluded Fulham Road, far away from the distracting noise and bustle of the town, and went to pay a visit to his wife at Holland Park. Some of the trees of that garden must have been planted even before Addison's day. There was a mighty mulberry-tree—a straggler from Melbury (once Mulbery) Road—and this was probably one of the thousands planted by King James when he became possessed of that admirable idea of silk culture in England. Now, strange to say, I could picture to myself much more vividly the presence of Addison in that garden than I can the bustle of the old Castle's people within the walls which dominate my present ground. These people occupied the Castle from century to century. When they first entered into possession they wore the costume of the Conquest, and no doubt they honoured the decrees of fashion as they changed from year to year; but they faded away without leaving a record of any personality to absorb the attention of the centuries, and without such an individuality I find it impossible to realise the scene, except for an occasional hour when the moonlight bathes the tower of the ruined keep, and I fancy that I hear the iron tread of the warder going his rounds—I cannot plunge myself into the spacious days of plate armour. It is the one Great Man or the one Great Woman that enables us nowadays to realise his or her period, and our Castle has unhappily no ghost with a name, and one ghost with a name is more than an armed host of nonentities. There is a tradition—there is just a scrap of evidence to support it—that Dr. Samuel Johnson once visited a house in the High Street and ate cherries in the garden. Every time I have visited that house I have seen the lumbering Hogarthian hero intent upon his feast, and every time that I am in that garden I hear the sound of his “Why, sir——”

I complained bitterly to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was with us in the tilt-yard garden, that we had not even the shadow of a ghost—ghosts by the hundred, no doubt, but no real ghost of some one that did things.

“You will have to create one for yourself,” he said.

“One must have bones and flesh and blood—plenty of blood, before one can create a ghost, as you well know,” said I. “I have searched every available spot for a name associated with the place, but I have found nothing.”

“Don't be in a hurry; he'll turn up some day when you're not expecting him,” said my friend.

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But I am still awaiting an entity connected with the Castle, and I swear, as did the young Lord Hamlet:—

“By Heaven! I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.”