Bulwick Hall, in Northamptonshire, the home of the Tryon family, but,
when the pictures were painted, in the occupation of Lord and Lady Henry
Grosvenor, is a roomy, comfortable stone building of the seventeenth
century. The long, low, rather plain-looking house of two stories only,
is entered in an original manner by a doorway in the middle of a stone
passage, at right angles to the building, and connecting it with a
garden house. The careful classical design and balustraded parapet of
the outer wall of this entrance, and the repetition of the same, only
with arched openings, to the garden side, scarcely prepare one for the
unadorned house-front; but the whole is full of a quiet, simple dignity
that is extremely restful and pleasing. Other surprises of the same
character await one in further portions of the garden.
Passing straight through the entrance gate there is a quiet space of
grass; a level court with flagged paths, bounded on the north by the
house and on the east and west by the arcade and the wall of the kitchen
garden. The ground falls slightly southward, and the fourth side leads
down to the next level by grass slopes and a flight of curved steps
widening below. Trees and shrubs are against the continuing walls to
right and left, and beds and herbaceous borders are upon the grassy
space. The wide green walk, between long borders of hardy plants,
leading forward from the foot of the steps, reaches a flower-bordered
terrace wall, and passes through it by a stone landing to steps to right
and left on its further side. A few steps descend in twin flights to
other landings, from which a fresh flight on each side reaches the
lowest garden level, some nine feet below the last. The whole of this
progression, with its pleasant variety of surface treatment and means
of descent, is in one direct line from a garden door in the middle of
the house front.
The lowest flight of steps, the subject of the first picture, has a
simple but excellent wrought-iron railing, of that refined character
common to the time of its making. It was draped, perhaps rather
over-draped when the picture was painted, with a glory of Virginia
Creeper in fullest gorgeousness of autumn colouring. This question of
the degree to which it is desirable to allow climbing plants to cover
architectural forms, is one that should be always carefully considered.
Bad architecture abounds throughout the country, and free-growing plants
often play an entirely beneficent part in concealing its mean or vulgar
or otherwise unsightly character. But where architectural design is good
and pure, as it is at Bulwick, care should be taken in order to prevent
its being unduly covered. Old brick chimney-stacks of great beauty are
often smothered with Ivy, and the same insidious native has obliterated
many a beautiful gate-pier and panelled wall. But the worst offender in
modern days has been the far-spreading Ampelopsis Veitchii, useful for
the covering of mean or featureless buildings, but grievously and
mischievously out of place when, for instance, ramping unchecked over
the old brickwork of Wolsey’s Palace at Hampton Court. Some may say that
it is easily pulled off; but this is not so, for it leaves behind,
tightly clinging to the old brick surface, the dried-up sucker and its
tentacle, desiccated to a consistency like iron wire. These are
impossible to detach without abrasion of surface, while, if left, they
show upon the brick as a scurfy eruption, as disfiguring to the
wall-face as are the scars of smallpox on a human countenance.
The iron-railed steps in the picture come down upon a grassy space
rather near its end. Behind the spectator it stretches away for quite
four times the length seen in the picture. It is bounded on the side
opposite the steps by a long rectangular fish-pond. The whole length of
this is not seen, for the grass walk narrows and passes between old yew
hedges, one on the side of the pond, the other backed by some other
trees against the kitchen garden wall, which is a prolongation of the
terrace wall in the picture.