gentry, to which, on certain days, people are allowed free access, and where many thousands of those whose lot is cast amid the toil and turmoil of great towns have thus the privilege of refreshing their eyes and senses with the floral and other treasures on which so much cost and care have been expended. The grounds over which the head-gardener is taking you are very extensive; and nature has given such a romantic diversity to the situation, and varied it with such beautiful slopes, soft lawns, deep valleys and bold hills, that it must have been a pleasing task to introduce art to give the crowning grace to Nature’s work. This task fell to the care of the head-gardener. His was the brain to plan; his was the experience to carry out the plans; his was the fostering care that crowned those plans with such complete success; and the satisfactory effect of the gardens must, in a great measure, be attributed to his cultivated taste and artistic eye for pleasing combinations of forms and judicious distribution of colours. Woods, lakes, pools, fountains, clumps of trees, single trees, masses of shrubs, all have to be duly arranged for, and, as it were, made to fall into their respective positions in the landscape; and no slight experience or imperfect knowledge of the harmonies of colours could lay out an upland undulating lawn of fifty or a hundred acres, so that the wood and water should be made to assume their most picturesque forms, and a million bright blossoms of every hue be gathered into their proper places. The head-gardener has to look to this, and to take full advantage of the capabilities of the ground; and the result of his labours is a triumph of landscape gardening, creditable alike to his fine taste and practical skill. And, thanks to the kindness of heart and uncommon liberality of the noble owners of such gardens, their beauties are freely shown to thousands of the industrious classes, whose long days of toil amid brick and smoke and steam make a visit to the fresh loveliness of the country a healthy medicine to mind and body.
As we stroll through such gardens as these, and gaze upon the many flower-beds, each, for the most part filled with but one particular kind of flower, but all one blaze of beauty; and, as we admire the undulating ribbon-borders, as they are called, composed of thin lines of flowers, crimson, orange, blue, white, purple, and scarlet, all lying closely one behind the other, and, with their parti-coloured stripes, winding waving lines of floral loveliness between the level spaces of smooth turf and the dark masses of shrubs,—as we feast our eyes upon these glowing colours and rich masses, the head-gardener gives us some little idea of the quantity of bedding-plants that he has used to make this show. They are no less (he says) than one hundred and fifty thousand, and their very lowest cost would be seven thousand pounds; but they have nearly all been raised in the gardens. He also points out to the visitor valuable specimens of the Pine tribe, small plants of which have cost thirty pounds; and also of the Pinus macrocarpa, from the Rocky Mountains, and of the P. nobilis, in his quest for which Mr. Douglas, the collector, met with a more horrible death than could, perhaps, be conceived by the brain of a “sensation” novelist for the destruction of the villain of his romance—the falling into a pit in which wild oxen had been entrapped, who, savage by nature, and maddened by captivity and hunger, fell upon the unfortunate martyr of science and gored him to death.
Who loves a garden, loves a green-house too,
says the poet Cowper; and it is in the green-houses and conservatories that a chief portion of the head-gardener’s labours can receive their due meed of appreciation. Indeed his labour and skill are by no means at an end when the flowers have been raised and brought into bloom; for their effect may be marred by an injudicious arrangement. The “grateful mixtures of well-matched and sorted hues,” is indispensable; and such a labour “asks the touch of taste.” But, when the visitor views the perfected work, he can scarcely help thinking how delightful must be the office of that man whose daily duties are discharged amid all that is so bright and beautiful. And, certainly to one, who on a lovely summer’s day, looks upon the flower-knots, each filled with its own peculiar colour, and scattered like rainbow drops over the wide expanse of velvet lawn—to one who observantly rambles through such gardens, drinking in deep draughts of delight at every step, as the varied beauties of the spot pass before him—its pools and lakes and fountains, its rockeries and statuary, its clumps of giant timber, its stately chestnuts and swarthy copper-beeches, its thickets of rhododendrons and azaleas, its undulating ribbon-borders, its great conservatory crammed with bloom, with climbing plants wreathed around its pillars and girders, and swinging their festoons on high; the orange-house with its living bridal bouquets and golden globes; the green-houses, with their roses and heaths and begonias, and gloxinias, and camellias, and a thousand and one floral attractions; the vineries, and pineries, and peacheries, and orchard houses rich with luscious fruit; and the stoves, hot and damp, and overpoweringly fragrant with the odour of Cape jessamine and delicate exotics, with fairy-like ferns and rare lycopodiums, with water lilies and other aquaria floating in their hot tanks, with dwarf trees and tussock grasses, and prickly cactuses, and strange orchids with their curious blossoms like winged birds, butterflies and insects—to one who gazes with pleased surprise on all these beautiful objects, and sees how
All rare blossoms, from every clime,
Grow in that garden in perfect prime,
and finds everything so successful and complete, so neat and trim and orderly, no dead leaves or parasites, or
Killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
(such as the lady of The Sensitive Plant would have removed in her basket of Indian woof,) to mar the perfect beauty of the plants—to one who sees this on a lovely summer’s day, the view of a head-gardener’s situation is tinged with a roseate hue. The idea harmonises with the odorous beauties around. To be daily among such an accumulated wealth of loveliness must be a privilege, and the proud possessor of that privilege is a man to be envied.
