those especially of tall stature making a fine effect. The Rose garden
has White Pinks in its outer beds. Immediately beyond the garden’s
bounds is wild ground of a beautiful character. The river Kent, a
rock-strewn stream with steep wooded banks, flows within fifty yards of
the house. The contrast is a great and a delightful one. Wild parkland
and untamed river without; and within the walls ordered restraint; then
again, the quiet of the wide bowling-green, with its dark clipped
hedges, and beyond it a long, tree-shaded walk.
Precious, indeed, are the few remaining gardens that have anything of
the character of this wonderful one of Levens; gardens that above all
others show somewhat of the actual feeling and temperament of our
ancestors. They show personal discrimination combining happily with
common-sense needs; walls and masses of yew and box to make shelter from
the violence of wind, and yet to admit the welcome sunlight; so to
provide the best conditions in the inner spaces for the growing of
lovely flowers. Then the shaping of some of the yews into strange forms,
shows perhaps the whimsical humour of some one of a line of owners,
preserved, with careful painstaking, by his descendants.
A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the minds of
several of such possessors--men who have not only thankfully paced its
green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have held it in
that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure to be some
living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, or its
beauty. The original design may have become in some degree lost, but
unless the doings of the several owners have been in the way of
destruction or radical alteration, or something of obvious folly or bad
taste, the garden will have gained in a remarkable degree that quality
of human interest that is not easy to define but that is clearly
perceptible, not only to a trained critic but to any one who has
knowledge of its most vital needs and sympathy with its worthiest
expression. This precious utterance is not confined to this or to any
one special kind of gardening, but may pervade and illuminate almost any
one of the many ways in which men find their pleasure and delight in
ordering the sheltered seclusion of their home grounds, and enjoying the
varied beauty of tree and bush and flower.
It is only in gardens of the most rigidly formal type, such as are full
of architectural form and detail and admit of no alteration of the
original plan, that personal influence can least be exercised. This is
no doubt the reason why such gardens, correctly beautiful though they
may be, are those that give in smallest measure that wonderful sense of
the purest and most innocent happiness, that of all earthly enjoyments
seems to be the most directly God-given.
Yet, even in such gardens, it is not impossible that some impress of the
personal influence may be beneficently given, but the range of operation
is extremely limited, the greatest knowledge and ability are needed,
with the sure action of the keenest and most restrained judgment.