The gardens at Bramham in Yorkshire, laid out and built near the end of
the seventeenth century, are probably the best preserved in England or
the grounds that were designed at that time under French influence.
Wrest in Bedfordshire, and Melbourne in Derbyshire of which some
pictures will follow, are also gardens of purely French character.
It is extremely interesting to compare these gardens with those of a
more distinctly Italian feeling. Many features they have in common;
architectural structure and ornament, close-clipped evergreen hedges
inclosing groves of free-growing trees; parterres, pools and fountains.
Yet the treatment was distinctly different, and, though not easy to
define in words, is at once recognised by the eye.
For one thing the French school, shown in its extremest form by the
gardens of Versailles, dealt with much larger and more level spaces. The
gardens of Italian villas, whether of the Roman Empire or of the
Renaissance, were for the most part in hilly places; pleasant for summer
coolness. This naturally led to much building of balustraded terraces
and flights of steps, and of parterres whose width was limited to that
of the level that could conveniently be obtained. Whereas in France, and
in England especially, where the country house is the home for all the
year, the greater number of large places have land about them that is
more or less level and that can be taken in to any extent.
At Bramham the changes of level are not considerable, but enough to
furnish the designer with motives for the details of his plan. The
house, of about the same date as the garden, was internally destroyed by
fire in the last century. The well-built stone walls still stand, but
the building has never been restored. The stables and kennels are still
in use, but the owner, Captain Lane-Fox, lives in another house on the
outskirts of the park. The design of the gardens has often been
attributed to Le Nôtre, and is undoubtedly the work of his school, but
there is nothing to prove that the great French master was ever in
England.
The way to the house is through a large, well-timbered park. Handsome
gate-piers with stone-wrought armorial ornament lead into a forecourt
stretching wide to right and left. A double curved stairway ascends to
the main door. To the left of the house is an entrance to the garden
through a colonnade. Next to the garden front of the house, which faces
south-west, is a broad gravelled terrace. The ground rises away from the
house by a gently sloping lawn, but in the midmost space is a feature
that is frequent in the French gardening of the time, though unusual in
England: a long theatre-shaped extent of grass. There is a stone sundial
standing on two wide steps near the house, and a gradually heightened
retaining wall following the rise of the ground. Not more than two feet
high where it begins below, and there accentuated on either side by a
noble stone plinth and massive urn, the retaining wall, itself a
handsome object of bold masonry, follows a straight line for some
distance, and then swings round in a segmental curve to meet the equal
wall on the further side; thus inclosing a space of level sward. Midway
in the curve, where the wall is some twelve feet high, there appear to
have been niches in the masonry, possibly for fountains.
The wide gravel walk next the house-front falls a little as it passes to
the left, divides in two and continues by an upward slope on either side
of a wall-fountain in a small inclosure formed by the retaining walls of
the rising paths. The path then passes all round the large rectangular
pool, one end of which forms the subject of the picture. This shows well
the graceful ease and, one may say, the courteous suavity, that is the
foremost character of this beautiful kind of French designing. The high
level of the water in the pool, so necessary for good effect, is a
detail that is often overlooked in English gardens. Nothing looks worse
than a height of bare wall in a pool or fountain basin, and nothing is
more commonly seen in our gardens. The low stone kerb bordering the pool
is broken at intervals with only slightly rising pedestals for
[Illustration: THE POOL, BRAMHAM