buildings, for the old monks were grand constructors, and their
structures were not only solid but always beautiful.
One of the older of these at Cleeve Prior is a large circular dovecote
of stone masonry with tiled roof and small tiled cupola. Such buildings
were not unfrequent in the old days, and many of them remain. Sometimes
they are round in plan, sometimes four-, sometimes eight-sided.
Occasionally there is a central post inside, set on pivots to revolve
easily, with lateral arms carrying a ladder that reaches nearly to the
walls, so that any one of the many pigeon-holes can be reached.
To the left of the Apostles’ Garden, as you stand facing the house, a
little gate leads into the vegetable garden. It has narrow grass paths
bordered with old-fashioned flowers. A further gate leads into the
orchard. Behind the house is the home close with some fine trees; on two
other sides are the farm buildings, yard and rickyard.
How grandly the flowers grow in these old manor and farm gardens! How
finely the great masses of bloom compose, and how beautifully they
harmonise with the grey of the limestone wall and the wonderful colour
of the old tiled roof; both of them weather and lichen-stained; each
tile a picture in itself of grey and orange and tenderest pink.
The yews have got over their paler green colour of the early summer when
the young shoots are put forth, and have settled into the deep green
dress that they will wear till next May. For the time is September;
wheat harvesting is going on and the autumn flowers are in full vigour.
There are Dahlias, the great annual Sunflowers and the tall autumn
Daisy; Lavender and Michaelmas Daisies, with sweet herbs for the
kitchen, just as it should be in such a garden.
Some of these old pot-herbs are beautiful things deserving a place in
any flower garden. Sage--for instance--a half shrubby plant with
handsome grey leaf and whorled spikes of purple flowers; a good plant
both for winter and summer, for the leaves are persistent and the plant
well clothed throughout the year. Hyssop is another such handsome thing,
of the same family, with a quantity of purple bloom in the autumn, when
it is a great favourite with the butterflies and bumble bees. This is
one of the plants that was used as an edging plant in gardens in Tudor
days, as we read in Parkinson’s “Paradisus,” where Lavender-cotton,
Marjoram, Savoury and Thyme are also named as among the plants used for
the same purpose. Rue, with its neat bluish-green foliage, is also a
capital plant for the garden where this colour of leafage is desired.
Fennel, with its finely-divided leaves and handsome yellow flower, is a
good border plant, though rarely so used, and blooms in the late autumn.
Lavender and Rosemary are both so familiar as flower-garden plants that
we forget that they can also be used as neat edgings, if from the time
they are young plants they are kept clipped. Borage has a handsome blue
flower, as good as its relation the larger _Anchusa_. Tansy, best known
in gardens by the handsome _Achillea Eupatorium_, was an old inmate of
the herb garden. Sweet Cicely (_Myrrhis odorata_) has beautiful foliage,
pale green and fern-like, with a good umbel of white bloom, and is a
most desirable plant to group with and among early blooming flowers. And
we all know what a good garden flower is the common Pot Marigold.
The old farm buildings at Cleeve Prior are scarcely less beautiful than
the manor-house itself, and are remarkable for the timber erections,
open at the sides but with tiled roofs, that give sheltered access, by
outside stairways, to the lofts.
Throughout England the older farmhouses and buildings are full of
interest, not only to architects, but to many who are in sympathy with
good and simple construction, and have taken the pleasant trouble to
learn enough about it to understand how and why the buildings were
reared. And in these restless days of hurry and strain and close
competition in trades, and bad, cheap work, it is good to pass a quiet
hour in wandering about among structures set up four or even five
centuries ago by these grand building monks. The present writer had just
such a pleasure not long ago in the South of England, where a large
group of monastic farm buildings stands within sound of the wash of the
sea. They are on sloping ground, inclosing three sides of a square; a
wall, backed with trees, forming the fourth side. On the upper level is
a great barn; a much greater, the tithe barn, being opposite it on the
lower. Buildings containing stables, cattle-sheds and piggeries connect
the two. Between these and the wall opposite is a spacious yard; across
the middle is a raised causeway dividing the yard into two levels.
[Illustration: CLEEVE PRIOR: SUNFLOWERS