New Garden Books

AT the present day an interest in gardening seems to have sprung up like Jonah’s gourd, and if the appearance of garden books be a sign of the times there are no symptoms of its abatement. Ever since Elizabeth spied out the land, claims in the forgotten fields of garden-lore have been staked thick and fast. Among the recent arrivals are Miss Nichols, with her English Pleasure Gardens,¹ and Mrs. Earle, whose Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday² follows hard on the track of her Old Time Gardens.

English Pleasure Gardens is a large, handsome octavo, portly and imposing, enjoying the leisurely comforts of large type and a placid breadth of margin; a book which stands like a solid and substantial dowager among the lighter and more frivolous garden-sisterhood, — charming but sometimes irresponsible.

The reader turns the pages at first, delighting in glimpses of the old gardens, reproductions from tapestries; but if he thinks to take Miss Nichols’s hand and saunter carelessly down the flowery by-paths of garden-chat, or linger in the garden-seats of old orchards (“roosting places,” as the Duke of Buckingham happily terms them), and dream over Elizabethan gardens, he will find himself mistaken: Miss Nichols is not given to dreaming, she does not even incline to roosting places, — except historically considered, — and the layman, instead of such pleasing loitering, will find himself walking briskly along the harder paths of learning.

The book is a careful, detailed setting forth of the formal garden, from its first development on British soil, during the Roman occupation, to the present time. Although the first chapter is devoted to the classic villa gardens, and there is later in the book a résumé of Italian garden-art, of the French system — these are introduced solely in regard to their influence on English garden-craft, for Miss Nichols wanders no farther from her subject than the flower-beds stray beyond the tall yew hedges.

The subject is naturally taken up historically. There are the monastic gardens of the twelfth century when religion and horticulture fared peacefully hand in hand. As to the mediæval garden, direct sources of information are few: —

Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels.” So with Chaucer and Lydgate and the Roman de la Rose, with illuminations of old manuscript and the tapestry (as Browning advises) Miss Nichols makes an excellent reconstruction of the mediæval pleasaunce; although, of course, some allowance must be made for the inventiveness of poet as well as painter,

— “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, ” said Sir Philip Sidney, and, after all, these old gardens with their fruit trees, their beds of medicinal herbs and pot-herbs, partook chiefly of the nature of the kitchen garden. It was long before beauty for beauty’s sake was frankly sought; with the early English garden as with Gilpin’s wife, —

The idea of utility was always present.

Under the Tudors, we find the garden coming more into its own. It is a pity that the “flowery orchard ” of these early days is not oftener reproduced with its gay borders of flowers and the violets and crocuses coming up happily from the turf under the blossomed trees. Then follows the Elizabethan garden,

— “the blossom of English genius at one of its sunniest moments, ” — when certainly, as never before, perhaps as never since, was understood the art of “making,” in Sidney’s words, “this too-much loved earth more lovely.”

But this is only half the book, though the more interesting half. The gardens under the Stuarts are treated in detail, also the seventeenth-century work when the brilliant and polished art of Le Nôtre largely influenced English taste — this Miss Nichols enters into more fully than one would think necessary — the Italian influence, the eighteenth-century devastations under poor Brown, whose shade must weary of the execrations of more than a hundred years of garden-lovers. Modern garden-craft is but slightly touched upon.

The work is very beautifully illustrated ; not only are the representative gardens of the different periods Penshurst, Levens, Hatfield, Wilton, and many others there in charming photographs, but the text is full of sketches, by the author, of arbors and gardenhouses, gateways, terraces, garden-seats, and Greek exedrae, statues and bits of topiary work, patterns of “knots,” — the intricate raised flower-beds, plans as well as photographs of the well-known gardens; Miss Nichols is even kind enough in some cases to name the inmates of the various flower-beds that he who cares to “ follow in their train ” may have no difficulty.

As a careful and detailed study of the different periods of garden-craft, English Pleasure Gardens will be of value to the student, of much interest to the garden-lover; it is clearly and even pleasantly written; one could wish that beside the plans and descriptions more of the spirit and poetry of the old gardens had infused Miss Nichols’s text, some of the fragrance and freshness of the outdoor world of which John Muir’s writings are as full as a mountain brook is of music; yet charm and analysis are not boon companions; although the author has been careful about many things, one might say of her as it was said of Martha, “but one thing is needful, ” — the charm which is to a book what fragrance is to a flower.

Although not a garden-book strictly speaking it is to garden-lovers that Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday will chiefly commend itself, for the garden and the sundial are old intimates, — “ Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise,” quotes Mrs. Earle.

There is indeed much of the Charm and Sentiment of Sun-dials in her first chapter, and the reader is loath to leave the fellowship of Elia and Dante Rossetti for the classification of dials, or even the dimensions of the dial of Glamis, to go on from the poetry of the dial to its prose; not so Mrs. Earle; she goes into her subject with all the enthusiasm of zeal and knowledge,— in fact, the profusion of photographs would suffice to show the zeal were the text wholly lacking. There is the dial of Ahaz, and of John Knox, historic dials and dials of American country places, Harriet Martineau’s and “E. V. B’s,” vertical dials, ceiling dials, cross-dials, dials on corbels, and lectern-headed dials, as well as the more familiar horizontal dials. There is also a remarkably complete chapter on portable dials, admirably illustrated.

To one who has purposed in his heart to set up a dial, Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday will be most valuable. Mrs. Earle gives just the details of which the amateur enthusiast stands in sore need; not only simpler rules even than Chaucer made for his “litle son . . . naked words in Englissh, for Latyn he kanstow yet but smal, my litle son,” but also chapters on gnomons and pedestals, on sundial-mottoes, on the setting of dials, which will be suggestive. No doubt some reader, hitherto happy, will find his life and his garden incomplete until blessed with a dial.

As far as the roses are concerned, however, except for illustrations, the title is a delusion and a snare, for the sundials are many and the roses are few. Although the Rosicrucians are present, and the rose as an emblem and the rose in English history are there, but one chapter is devoted to our grandmothers’ roses, the Velvets, the Damasks, — roses which have a certain graciousness and charm, an endearing quality which many of the newer ones lack, sumptuous and brilliant as they are. It is a pleasure to find Mrs. Earle speaking a word for the tiny clustered roses, and for the older climbers, in these days when size seems to be the first requirement, and the Crimson-Rambler, like Aaron’s rod, has swallowed up all other climbing roses; it is a pleasure also to notice the protest against the sacrifice of everything for the individual bloom, while the garden presents an “expanse of tall, thickly set sticks and scant, low growing foliage. ” It may be a nursery or a sanitarium for roses, but it is not a garden in the sense that the poet meant when he wrote of “a gardenfull of rose - trees and a soul - full of comforts ” as if the two were synonymous.

Mrs. Earle has accumulated much information concerning her subjects which is agreeably “bodied forth,” but as a book Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday lacks a backbone, — it is disconnected. While relating in a measure to gardening, there is in it altogether too much solid discussion of dialing to give the author the gardener’s license to ramble, “ led by the hops and skips, turnings and windings of his brain,” as old Markham says. One suspects Mrs. Earle of a housewifely thrift in making use of odds and ends of a literary cupboard. The chapter on Rural Saints and Prophets, for instance, although interesting, has but the barest connection with the book, and the seeker after truth in the matter of sundials will find himself brought up against Mary Stuart’s tapestry or recipes for Rosa Solis, — interesting doubtless, but not what he “went out for to see.”

In a garden the sundial requires a certain formality of setting, however slight; the shrubs or flower-beds which surround it, the old garden-masters taught, must be carefully placed with reference to the dial as the centre of the design; so in a book; this “gardengod of Christian gardens,” as Charles Lamb calls it, deserves in its literary setting a symmetry, an ordered beauty, — which Mrs. Earle does not give it.

Frances Duncan.