Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
Of the inside of the house it is not fitting to speak in detail. Suffice it
to say that it is, in every respect, the fitting environment of a man of
advanced middle age, sometime scholar of Eton, still a Fellow of King's
College, Cambridge, much travelled, able to indulge a refined and catholic
taste in literature and art, of whose inner life books, pictures and plants
are the most familiar friends. But surely something may be written of the
great walled garden, behind all this and across the public road. It is
emphatically the most perfect "kitchen" garden I have ever seen, and on
this particular I may almost venture to claim to speak with some
authority--the authority, that is to say, which belongs to one who is a
natural lover of gardens, even of those which are useful, and who has had
the good fortune to see many of the finest gardens in England. How great
the space is 'tis hard to guess; it is ample. It is girt on all sides by
high brick walls, and these walls, although by no means ancient, have
already taken a glorious colour. Against them is trained all manner of
wall-fruit, the best aspects being chosen, of course, for the apricots, the
peaches and the nectarines, which delight to "drink the splendour of the
sun." The spacious area within the walls is divided into four parts by
pergolas converging upon a central circle of green turf. Those pergolas,
covering a wide avenue, are delightfully solid, their pillars united at the
top by stout timbers of cambered oak, sound enough to stand for centuries.
The life they support is that of cordon apples and pears, set close
together, and trained to absolute perfection. Both when the blossom is out,
especially when the pink of apple-blossom is at its best in May, and when
the fruit, ruddy, russet and golden, has taken its colour from the sun,
these pergolas must be a sight simply lovely. The central oasis of green
has, if memory serves accurately, a fountain in its midst, and round it
certainly are pillars clad with rambling roses, their tops united not, as
is customary, by drooping chains, but by stout hawsers, two inches or more
in diameter, for which it is claimed that they suit the roses as supports
better than metal, which is subject to rapid changes of temperature and
also to electrical influence. This last consideration was new to me, but
doubtless it rests on substantial ground, and the whole idea is an
illustration of what may be achieved in gardening by sympathy, which we can
all try to give--and by an expenditure which men of moderate means may well
shudder to contemplate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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