the life of the plant when the strength of the present bush comes to an
end.
Such a garden, full of so keen a personal interest, sets one thinking.
What will become of it fifty or a hundred years hence? The flowers, with
due diligence of division, and replanting and enriching of the soil,
will live for ever. The name-plates, with care and protection from
breakage, will also live. But what will these names be one or two
generations hence? Will the plants all be there? And what of the
Friendships? They are something belonging intimately to the lives of
those now living. What record of them will endure; or enduring, be of
use or comfort to those who come after?
Then one thinks and wonders--what hand, perhaps quite a humble
one--planted the old apple-tree that has its stem now girdled by a
rustic seat. Its days are perhaps already numbered; the top is thin and
open, the foliage is spare; it seems to be beyond fruit-bearing age, and
as if it had scarcely strength to draw up the circulating sap.
And then, for all the carefulness given to the making of the garden and
its tender memories of human kindness in giving and receiving, the plant
that dominates the whole, and gives evidence of the oldest occupation
from times past, and promises the greatest attainment of age in days to
come, is the Ivy on the old Stone Hall. Probably it was never planted at
all--came by itself, as we carelessly say--or planted, as we may more
thoughtfully and worthily say, by the hand of God, and now doing its
part of sheltering and fostering the Garden of Friendship. Should not
the Ivy also have its heart-shaped plate and its most grateful and
reverent inscription, as a noble plant, the gift of the kindest Friend
of all, who first created a garden for the sustenance and delight of man
and put into his heart that love of beautiful flowers that has always
endured as one of the chiefest and quite the purest of his human
pleasures?
There is a rose-garden beyond the bank of shrubs to the left, where each
Rose, on one of the permanent labels, here shaped after the pattern of a
Tudor Rose, has a quotation from the poets. Here are, among others, the
older roses of our gardens, the Damask and the Rose of Provence, the
Cinnamon and the Musk Rose, the bushy Briers and the taller Eglantine
that we now call Sweetbrier.
Close at hand there is also a Shakespeare Garden, designed to show what
were the garden-flowers commonly in use in his time. Here we may again
find Rosemary--that sweetly aromatic shrub, so old a favourite in
English gardens. Its long-enduring scent made it the emblem of constancy
and friendship. And here should be Rue, also classed by Shakespeare
among “nose-herbs,” and the sweet-leaved Eglantine, and Lads-Love, Balm
and Gilliflowers (our Carnations), a few kinds of Lilies, Musk and
Damask Roses, Violets, Peonies, and many others of our oldest garden
favourites.