STONE HALL, EASTON
THE FRIENDSHIP GARDEN
IT was a pleasant thought, that of the lover of good flowers and firm friend of many good people, who first had the idea of combining the two sentiments into a garden of enduring beauty.
Such a garden has been made at Easton by the Countess of Warwick. The site of the Friendship Garden has been happily chosen, close to the remains of an ancient house called Stone Hall, which now serves Lady Warwick as a garden-house and library of garden books.
The flower-plots are arranged in a series of concentric circles; the plants are the gifts of friends. The name of each plant and that of the giver are recorded on an imperishable majolica plaque. Many well-known givers’ names are here, from that of the very highest in the land downward. The plants themselves comprise many of the best and handsomest.
The picture shows the garden as it is about the middle of September; the time of the great White Pyrethrum, the perennial Sunflowers and the earliest of the Michaelmas Daisies. The bush of Lavender is blooming late, its normal flowering time is a month earlier. But Lavender, especially when some of the first bloom is cut, will often go on flowering, as later-formed shoots come to blooming strength. Let us hope that the giver is not shortlived like the gift, for Lavender bushes, after a few years of strong life, soon wear out. Already this one is showing signs of age, and it would be well to set a few cuttings in spring or autumn, or, still better, to layer it by one of the lower branches, in order to renew the life of the plant when the strength of the present bush comes to an end.
STONE HALL, EASTON: THE FRIENDSHIP GARDEN
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
THE COUNTESS OF WARWICK
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.
