CONDOVER HALL near Shrewsbury is a stately house of important size and aspect—one of the many great houses that were reared in the latter half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Its general character gives the impression of severity rather than suavity, though the straight groups of chimneys have handsome heads, and the severe character is mitigated on the southern front by an arcade in the middle space of the ground floor. The same stern treatment pervades the garden masonry. No mouldings soften the edges of the terrace steps; parapets and retaining walls, with the exception of the balustrade of the main terrace, are without ornament of light and shade; plainly weathered copings being their only finish. Only here and there, a pier that carries a large Italian flower-pot has a little more ornament of rather massive bracket form.
The garden spaces are large and largely treated, as befits the place and its environment of park-land amply furnished with grand masses of tree-growth. On the southern side of the house, where the ground falls away, are two green flats and slopes, leading to a lower walk parallel with their length and with the terrace above. The steps in the picture are the top flight of a succession leading to these lower levels. The lower and narrower grassy space has a row of clipped yews of a rounded cone-shape. The upper level has a design of the same, but of different patterns.
The balustrade in the picture is old, probably of the same date as the house; much of the other stonework is modern. The circular seat on a raised platform, with its stone-edged flower-beds, has a very happy effect, and its yew-hedge backing joins well into the older yews that overlap the parapet of the steps; their colour contrasting distinctly with that of the more distant Ilex, a magnificent example of a tree that deserves more general use in English gardens. The parterre above the steps and on a level with the house has box hedges, after the Italian manner, three feet high and two feet wide. These, with some of the yew hedges, were planted a hundred years ago, though much of the garden, with its ornaments of fine Italian flower-pots, was the work of the former owner, the late Mr. Reginald Cholmondeley, a man of powerful personality and fine taste.
CONDOVER: THE TERRACE STEPS
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
MISS AUSTEN LEIGH
The most important part of the garden lies to the west of the house, where there is a double garden of stiff pattern with high box borders and clipped evergreens. At a right angle to this, the spectator, standing at some distance westward, and looking back towards the east and straight with the space between the pair of gardens of angular design, sees a broad space flanked on either side by a row of handsome upright yews. The ground between is a flower garden of large diamond-shaped beds in two sizes, with cleverly-arranged green edgings. But now that the large Irish yews have grown to their early maturity, dominating the garden and insisting on their own strong parallel lines, it is open to question whether it would not have been better to have had a wide, clear middle space of green straight down the length, with the flowers in shapely, ordered masses to right and left. The close succession of large beds gives the impression of impediments to comfortable progress.
It was wise to leave the Irish yews unclipped. Though the common English yew is the tree that is of all others the most docile to the discipline of training and shearing, the upright growing variety will have none of it. In some fine English gardens they are clipped, always with disastrous effect. They will only take one form: that of an ugly swollen bottle, or lamp-chimney with a straight top. Their own form is quite symmetrical enough for use in any large design.
