BULWICK HALL, in Northamptonshire, the home of the Tryon family, but, when the pictures were painted, in the occupation of Lord and Lady Henry Grosvenor, is a roomy, comfortable stone building of the seventeenth century. The long, low, rather plain-looking house of two stories only, is entered in an original manner by a doorway in the middle of a stone passage, at right angles to the building, and connecting it with a garden house. The careful classical design and balustraded parapet of the outer wall of this entrance, and the repetition of the same, only with arched openings, to the garden side, scarcely prepare one for the unadorned house-front; but the whole is full of a quiet, simple dignity that is extremely restful and pleasing. Other surprises of the same character await one in further portions of the garden.
Passing straight through the entrance gate there is a quiet space of grass; a level court with flagged paths, bounded on the north by the house and on the east and west by the arcade and the wall of the kitchen garden. The ground falls slightly southward, and the fourth side leads down to the next level by grass slopes and a flight of curved steps widening below. Trees and shrubs are against the continuing walls to right and left, and beds and herbaceous borders are upon the grassy space. The wide green walk, between long borders of hardy plants, leading forward from the foot of the steps, reaches a flower-bordered terrace wall, and passes through it by a stone landing to steps to right and left on its further side. A few steps descend in twin flights to other landings, from which a fresh flight on each side reaches the lowest garden level, some nine feet below the last. The whole of this progression, with its pleasant variety of surface treatment and means of descent, is in one direct line from a garden door in the middle of the house front.
The lowest flight of steps, the subject of the first picture, has a simple but excellent wrought-iron railing, of that refined character common to the time of its making. It was draped, perhaps rather over-draped when the picture was painted, with a glory of Virginia Creeper in fullest gorgeousness of autumn colouring. This question of the degree to which it is desirable to allow climbing plants to cover architectural forms, is one that should be always carefully considered. Bad architecture abounds throughout the country, and free-growing plants often play an entirely beneficent part in concealing its mean or vulgar or otherwise unsightly character. But where architectural design is good and pure, as it is at Bulwick, care should be taken in order to prevent its being unduly covered. Old brick chimney-stacks of great beauty are often smothered with Ivy, and the same insidious native has obliterated many a beautiful gate-pier and panelled wall. But the worst offender in modern days has been the far-spreading Ampelopsis Veitchii, useful for the covering of mean or featureless buildings, but grievously and mischievously out of place when, for instance, ramping unchecked over the old brickwork of Wolsey’s Palace at Hampton Court. Some may say that it is easily pulled off; but this is not so, for it leaves behind, tightly clinging to the old brick surface, the dried-up sucker and its tentacle, desiccated to a consistency like iron wire. These are impossible to detach without abrasion of surface, while, if left, they show upon the brick as a scurfy eruption, as disfiguring to the wall-face as are the scars of smallpox on a human countenance.
The iron-railed steps in the picture come down upon a grassy space rather near its end. Behind the spectator it stretches away for quite four times the length seen in the picture. It is bounded on the side opposite the steps by a long rectangular fish-pond. The whole length of this is not seen, for the grass walk narrows and passes between old yew hedges, one on the side of the pond, the other backed by some other trees against the kitchen garden wall, which is a prolongation of the terrace wall in the picture.
The garden is still beautifully kept, but owes much of its wealth of hardy flowers to the planting of Lady Henry Grosvenor, whose fine taste and great love of flowers made it in her day one of the best gardens of hardy plants, and whose untimely death, in the very prime of life, was almost as much deplored by the best of the horticultural amateurs who only knew her by reputation, but were aware of her good work in gardening, as by her wide circle of personal friends.
BULWICK: THE GATEWAY
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF LORD HENRY GROSVENOR
She had a special love for the flag-leaved Irises, and used them with very fine effect. The borders that show to right and left of the steps had them in large groups, and were masses of bloom in June; other plants, placed behind and between, succeeding them later. Lady Henry was one of the first amateurs to perceive the value of planting in this large way, and, as she had ample spaces to deal with, the effects she produced were very fine, and must have been helpful in influencing horticultural taste in a right direction.
Another important portion of the garden at Bulwick is a long double flower-border backed by holly hedges, that runs through the whole middle length of the kitchen garden. It is in a straight line with the flagged walk that passes westward across the green court next to the house, and parallel with its garden front. The flagged path stops at the gate-piers in the second picture, a grass path following upon the same line and passing just behind the shaded seat.
The holly hedges that back the borders are old and solid. Their top line, shaped like a flat-pitched roof, is ornamented at intervals with mushroom-shaped finials, each upon its stalk of holly stem. The grass walk and double border pass right across the kitchen garden in the line of its longest axis. At the furthest end there is another pair of the same handsome gate-piers with a beautiful wrought-iron gate, leading into the park. The park is handsomely timbered, and in early summer is especially delightful from the great number of fine old hawthorns.
In Lady Henry’s time several borders in the kitchen garden were made bright with annuals and other flowers. Such borders are very commonly used for reserve purposes, such as the provision of flowers for cutting, with one main double border for ornament alone. But where gardens are being laid out from the beginning, such a plan as this at Bulwick, of a grass path with flower borders and a screening hedge at the back, passing through a kitchen garden, is an excellent one, greatly enlarging the length of view of the pleasure garden, while occupying only a relatively small area. It is also well in planning a garden to provide a reserve space for cutting alone, of beds four feet, and paths two feet wide, and of any length suitable for the supply required. This has the advantage of leaving the kitchen garden unencumbered with any flower-gardening, and therefore more easy to work.
Such a long-shaped garden is also capable of various ways of treatment as to its edge, which need not necessarily be an unbroken line. The length of the border in question is perhaps a little too great. It might be better, while keeping the effect of a quiet line, looking from end to end, to have swung the edge of the border back in a segment of a circle to a little more than half its depth, every few yards, in such a proportion as a plan to scale would show to be right; or to have treated it in some one of the many possible ways of accentuation where the cross paths occur that divide it into three lengths. The thinking out of these details according to the conditions of the site, the combining of them into designs that shall add to its beauty, and the actual working of them, the mind meanwhile picturing the effect in advance—these are some of the most interesting and enlivening of the many kinds of happiness that a garden gives.
Be it large or small there is always scope for inventive ability; either for the bettering of something or for the casting of some detail into a more desirable form. Every year brings some new need; in supplying it fresh experience is gained, and with this an increasing power of adapting simple means to such ends as may be easily devised to the advancement of the garden’s beauty.
