Pyramid of Marble: The Garden of Euphues

There were raised walks, mounts, arbours, orchards and fountains. In England there were these things together with more flowers and better turf. Compared with the Belvedere and the Villa d'Este, with Amboise and Fontainebleau, the Hampton Court of Henry VIII was thick with fragrant flowers; compared with a twentieth-century bypass bungalow it was bare. Most European flowers bloom in the spring; by the end of June, were it not for immigrants from Asia, Africa, and America, there would be little to look forward to. The comparative flowerlessness of gardens until the nineteenth century was because for nine or ten months of the year scarcely any flowers were to be had. Why give up ground to garden beds that will so long be bare and empty? This was so great a handicap that much later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most gardens in Europe were entirely flowerless. Stephen Switzer, writing in 1716, argued half-heartedly in favour of keeping flowers in the town garden, but was firm in rejecting them from the country estate: `Gentlemen's Affairs commonly dividing their time between the Town and Country, they spending the latter part of the Winter and the Spring, and sometimes longer in Town, and the rest of their Time in the Country: The first answers by the Beauty of the Flowers in the Spring, which is over by the end of May; whilst in the latter part of the Year the nobler diversions of the country take place, at which time, in truth, the Beauty of Flowers is gone, and Borders are like Graves, and rather a Blemish than a Beauty to our finest Gardens.' Neither in French nor Flemish nor Dutch gardens were flowers of much importance, though they were commoner in the Netherlands than in France. The tulip-cult in Holland was no more a sign of the love of flowers than the price of Impressionist pictures is an indication of a super sensibility to painting amongst Greek ship owners. The tulip, long the favourite flower of the Turk and the Persian, was first flowered in the West at Augsburg in 1559. Within twenty years speculation in the bulb became centered in Holland, where enthusiasm was enormous. Yet its fascination was felt by the connoisseur and the collector rather than by the gardener working as an artist. In practice tulip culture militated against other flowers, for when the beds were not occupied with the bulbs there was nothing else sufficiently vivid in hue to take their place; it was to compensate for the absence of the gaudy tulip that gardeners took to filling their flower-beds with balls and sheets of coloured glass. It now became clear that there were two distinct approaches to gardening and not all gardeners were sure which way to go.