Throughout the length and breadth of England it would be hard to find
borders of hardy flowers handsomer or in any way better done than those
at Arley in Cheshire. The house, an old one, was much enlarged by the
late Mr. R. E. Egerton-Warburton, and the making of the gardens, now
come to their young maturity, was the happy work of many years of his
life. Here we see the spirit of the old Italian gardening, in no way
slavishly imitated, but wholesomely assimilated and sanely interpreted
to fit the needs of the best kind of English garden of the formal type,
as to its general plan and structure. It is easy to see in the picture
how happily mated are formality and freedom; the former in the garden’s
comfortable walls of living greenery with their own appropriate
ornaments, and the latter in the grandly grown borders of hardy flowers.
The subject of the picture is the main feature in the garden plan. A
path some fifteen feet wide, with grassy verges of ample width, and deep
borders of hardy flowers. What is shown is about one fourth of the whole
length. At the back of the right-hand border is the high old wall of the
kitchen garden; on the left, as grand a wall of yew, ten feet high and
five feet thick, its straight line pleasantly broken and varied by
shaped buttresses of clipped yew, whose forms take that distinct light
and shade, and strong variations of solidity of green colouring, that
make the surfaces of our clipped English yew so valuable a ground-work
for masses of brilliant flowers.
The same yew buttresses are against the wall on the right, placed
symmetrically with the ones opposite. Near the end, as shown in the
picture, the last pair of buttresses come forward the whole width of
the border, each buttress ending in an important shaped finial to the
front. Between these and the well-designed alcove in stone masonry that
so satisfactorily ends the walk, is a space of turf, leading on the
left, through an arch cut in the ten-foot-high yew hedge, to the
bowling-green. Nothing can make a more effective shelter than such grand
yew hedges; the solid wall itself is scarcely better. Even on the
roughest days, with a storm of wind of destructive power outside, the
space within is calm and sheltered, and the flowers escape that cruel
battering from fierce blasts that add so much to the difficulty of
gardening in exposed places. But the planting and thus providing this
much-needed shelter is just good gardening, and when, in addition, it is
done to a design of happy invention and true proportion, with just such
refinements of detail and ornament as are suited to the garden’s calibre
and the owner’s endowment, then, with the addition of splendid masses of
good flowers grandly grown, do we find gardening at its best.
The time of year of this picture is in or near the second week of July,
when the White Lily is at its finest, and the Orange Lily is in bloom,
with the Blue Delphinium and many another good garden flower. One can
see how all the best garden flowers are utilised here. There is the
White Sidalcea at the front of the border, one of the many plants of the
Mallow family that are so important in our borders; for our grand
Hollyhocks are Mallows too. This White Sidalcea has much the same value
as the large White Snapdragon, one good variety of which, the precursor
of the many good large kinds now grown, was the only one of its kind at
the time the picture was painted. Of late their numbers have greatly
increased, and also their stature and the variety of their beautiful
colourings, so that now they can be used as tall plants of great effect.
Six feet two inches was the measurement of one grand spike of soft, rosy
colouring in the writer’s own garden last autumn. These capital plants
have been “fixed,” as gardeners say, in ranges of different heights;
tall, intermediate, and the quite dwarf little cushions whose form is
perhaps as little suited to the character of the plant as the foolish
little dwarf Sweet Peas, that are only wilfully wanton, freakish
distortions of a beautiful and graceful plant, whose duty it is to climb
and bring its pretty blooms up to the level of our admiring eyes and
appreciative noses. A good strong
[Illustration: THE ROSE GARDEN, ARLEY
from the picture in the possession of