There is perhaps no garden in England that has been so often described
or so much discussed as that at Levens in Westmorland, the home of
Captain Jocelyn Bagot.
It was laid out near the beginning of the eighteenth century by a French
gardener named Beaumont. There is nothing about it of the French manner,
as we know it, for it is more in the Dutch style of the time, and has
become in appearance completely English; according perfectly with the
beautiful old house, and growing with it into a complete harmony of
mellow age, whose sentiment is one of perfect unison both within and
without.
Forward of the house-front, in a space divided by intersecting paths
into six main compartments, is the garden. Flower-borders, box-edged on
both sides, form bordering ornaments all round these divisions. The
inner spaces are of turf. At the angles and at equal points along the
borders are strange figures cut in yew and box. Some are like turned
chessmen; some might be taken for adaptations of human figures, for one
can trace a hat-covered head--one of them wears a crown--shoulders and
arms and a spreading petticoat. Some of the yews, and these mostly in
the more open spaces of grass or walk, rise four-square as solid blocks,
with rounded roof and stemless mushroom finial. These have for the most
part arched recesses, forming arbours. One of the tallest, standing
clear on its little green, is differently shaped, being round in plan
above and the stems bared all round below, with an encircling seat.
No doubt many of the yews have taken forms other than those that were
originally designed; the variety of shape would be otherwise too
daring; but these recklessly defiant escapes from rule only add to the
charm of the place, presenting a fresh surprise at every turn. The play
of light and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped
evergreens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow,
cold, almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising
brilliancy of golden-green--often all bright gold-green when the young
shoots are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of
its many wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities
of form, offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light,
whose play upon them is infinitely varied. Then the beholder, passing on
and looking back, sees the whole thing coloured and lighted anew. This
quantity of Yew and Box clipped into an endless variety of fantastic
forms has often been criticised as childish. Would that all gardens were
childish in so happy a way! Is not the joy and perfectly innocent
delight that the true lover of flowers feels in a good garden in itself
akin to childishness, and is not a fine old English garden such as this,
with its numberless incidents that stir and gratify the imagination, and
its abundance of sweet and beautiful flowers, just the one that can give
that happiness in the greatest degree? Does not the oldest of our
legends, so closely bound up with our youngest apprehension of religious
teaching, tell us of the earliest of our race of whom we have any record
or even tradition, living happily in a garden in a state of childish
innocence? Why should a garden not be childish?--perhaps when it truly
deserves such a term it is the highest praise it could possibly have!
However this may be the fact remains that those who own this garden of
many wonders, and watch and tend it with unceasing love and reverence,
and others who have had the happiness of working in it for many days
together, find it a place that never wearies, but only continues day by
day to disclose new beauties and new delights. Doubtless it is a garden
that cannot be fairly judged from a hasty glance or a few hours’ visit.
Like many of the places and things that we call inanimate--though to one
who knows and loves a garden nothing is more vitally living--such a
place has its moods and can frown upon an unsympathetic beholder.
The garden is filled with many Roses and well-grown hardy plants;
[Illustration: LEVENS: ROSES AND PINKS