Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
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Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
I love a Dutch garden, "circummured" with brick. By a Dutch garden, I
mean a small garden, oblong or square, sunk about three or four feet in
a lawn--so that when surrounded by brick walls they seem about two feet
high when viewed outside, but are five feet or more high from within the
garden. There are brick or stone steps in the middle of each of the four
walls by which to descend to the garden, which may be all planted with
flowers, but preferably should have set borders of flowers with a
grass-plot in the centre. On either side of the steps should be brick
posts surmounted by Dutch pots with plants, or by balls of stone.
Planted with bulbs, these gardens in their flowering time are, as old
Parkinson said, a "perfect fielde of delite." We have very pretty Dutch
gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is
that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or
boxes for formal plants or shrubs.
Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an
intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for
being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness. I visited last
summer a beautiful estate which had a deep sunken Dutch garden with a
very low wall. It lay at the right side of the house at a little
distance; and beyond it, in full view of the peristyle, extended the
only squalid objects in the horizon. A garden on the level, well
planted, with distant edging of shrubbery, would have hidden every ugly
blemish and been a thing of beauty. As it is now, there can be seen from
the house nothing of the Dutch garden but a foot or two of the tops of
several clipped trees, looking like very poor, stunted shrubs. I must
add that this garden, with its low wall, has been a perfect man-trap. It
has been evident that often, on dark nights, workmen who have sought a
"short cut" across the grounds have fallen over the shallow wall, to the
gardener's sorrow, and the bulbs' destruction. Once, at dawn, the
unhappy gardener found an ancient horse peacefully feeding among the
Hyacinths and Tulips. He said he didn't like the grass in his new
pasture nor the sudden approach to it; that he was too old for such
new-fangled ways. I know another estate near Philadelphia, where the
sinking of a garden revealed an exquisite view of distant hills; such a
garden has reason for its form.
[Illustration: Roses and Violets in Garden at Greenwood, Thomasville,
Georgia.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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