Those who know the Dean of Rochester,[A] either personally or by
reputation, will know that where he dwells there will be a beautiful
garden. His fame as a rosarian has gone throughout the length and
breadth of Britain, and far beyond, and his practical activity in
spreading and fostering a love of Roses must have been the means of
gladdening many a heart, and may be reckoned as by no means the least
among the many beneficent influences of his long and distinguished
ministry.
[A] These lines were in print before the lamented death of Dean Hole.
A few days’ visit to Dean Hole’s own home at Caunton Manor, near Newark,
will ever remain among the writer’s pleasantest memories. It must have
been five and twenty years ago, and it was June, the time of Roses. To
one whose home was on a poor sandy soil it was almost a new sight to see
the best of Roses, splendidly grown and revelling in a good loam. Not
that the credit was mainly due to the nature of the garden ground, for,
as the Dean (then Canon Hole) points out in his delightful “Book about
Roses,” the soil had to be made to suit his favourite flower. In this,
or some one of his books, he feelingly describes how many of the
visitors to his garden, seeing the splendid vigour of his Roses, at once
ascribed it to the excellence of his soil. “Of course,” they said, “your
flowers are magnificent, but then, you see, you have got such a soil for
Roses.” “I should think I had got a soil for Roses,” was the reply,
“didn’t I mix it all myself and take it there in a barrow?” I quote from
memory, but this is the sense of this excellent lesson. The writer’s own
experience is exactly the same. Of the quantities of garden visitors
who have come--their number has had to be stringently limited of
late--not one in twenty will believe that one loves a garden well enough
to take a great deal of trouble about it.
In fact, it is only this unceasing labour and care and watchfulness; the
due preparation according to knowledge and local experience; the looking
out for signal of distress or for the time for extra nourishment, water,
shelter or support, that produces the garden that satisfies any one with
somewhat of the better garden knowledge; a knowledge that does not make
for showy parterres or for any necessarily costly complications; rather,
indeed, for all that is simplest, but that produces something that is
apparent at once to the eye, and sympathetic to the mind, of the true
garden-lover.
It must have been a painful parting from the well-loved Roses and the
many other beauties of the Caunton garden, when the new duties of
honourable advancement called Canon Hole from the old home to the
Deanery of Rochester; from the pure air of Nottinghamshire to that of a
town, with the added reek of neighbouring lime and cement works. But
even here good gardening has overcome all difficulties, and though, when
the air was more than usually loaded with the foul gases given off by
these industries, the Dean would remark, with a flash of his
characteristic humour, that Rochester was “a beautiful place--to get
away from,” yet the Deanery garden is now full of Roses and quantities
of other good garden flowers, all grandly grown and in the best of
health. Roses are in fact rampant. A rough trellis, simply made of split
oak after the manner of the hurdles used for folding sheep in the
Midlands, but about six feet high, stands at the back of the main double
flower-border. Rambling Roses and others of free-growing habit are
loosely trained to this, their great heads of bloom hanging out every
way with fine effect; each Rose is given freedom to show its own way of
beauty, while the trellis gives enough support and guides the general
line of the great hedge of Roses.
The Dean is not alone among the flowers, for Mrs. Hole is also one of
the best of gardeners.
The picture shows a portion of a double flower-border where a curving
path connects two others that are at different angles. In the
[Illustration: THE DEANERY GARDEN, ROCHESTER