I notice that most writers on garden-making begin by describing what a wilderness their place was when they first took it in hand. I cannot maintain that tradition. Mine had nothing of the wilderness about it. On the contrary, it was just too neat for my taste. The large lawn on to which some of the lower rooms of the house opened, had broad paths on each side and a broad flower border beyond. There was not a shrub on the lawn and only one tree--a majestic deodar spreading itself abroad at an angle of the nearest wing of the house; but on a knoll at the farther end of the lawn there were, we discovered next summer, pink and white mays, a wild cherry, and a couple of laburnums, backed by a towering group made up of sycamores and chestnuts. Such a plan of planting could not be improved upon, I felt certain, though I did not discuss it at the time; for I was not out to make an alteration, and my attention was wholly occupied with the appearance of the ancient walls, glorious with snapdragon up to the lilacs that made a coping of colour for the whole high range, while the lower brick boundary opposite was covered with pears and plums clasping hands in espalier form from end to end. But I was not sure about the flower borders which contained alternate clumps of pink geraniums and white daisies. Perhaps they were too strongly reminiscent of the window-boxes of the Cromwell Road through which I had walked every day for nearly twenty years, and in time one grows weary even of the Cromwell Road! But so well did the accident of one elbow of the wall of the bowling-green pushing itself out lend itself to the construction of the garden, that the first and most important element in garden-design was attained. This, I need hardly say, is illusion and surprise. One fancied that here the limits of the ground had been reached, for a fine deciduous oak seemed to block the way; but with investigation one found oneself at the entrance to a new range of grounds which, though only about three times as large as the first, seemed almost illimitable. The greater part had at one time been an orchard, we could see; but the trees had been planted too close to one another, and after thirty or forty years of jostling, had ceased to be of any pictorial or commercial value, and I saw that these would have to go. Beyond there was a kitchen garden and a large glass-house, and on one side there was a long curve of grass terrace made out of the Saxon or Roman earthwork, against which, as I have already said, the Norman walls were built, showing only about twelve or fifteen feet above the terrace, while being forty or fifty down to the dry moat outside. This low mural line was a mass of antirrhinums, wallflowers, and such ferns as thrive in rock crevices.