GARDENS OF THE PAST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 22, 26 January 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

GARDENS OF THE PAST.

SOME FAMOUS EXAMPLES. 36,000 WORKMEN EMPLOYED AT VERSAILLES. THE NOSEGAYS OF RAMESES. "The attempt failed after fever had taken the lives of several thousand of the soldiers." This sentence does not, as might be imagined, describe an unsuccessful military manoeuvre. A drawback to the laying out of the garden at Versailles —the world's largest garden of its daj' and kind—was the lack of a water supply, and in one attempt to overcome this difficulty no fewer than 3."),000 soldiers were employed, to no avail. Versailles as we know it to-da3' is but a shrunken remnant of Le Notre's scheme, which took 20 years to complete. employed as main' as 3(5,000 workmen at one time, and contained 1400 jets of water. But if Louis XIV., is to be awarded the palm for extravagance the eighteenth century ran to other extremes. By this time the English revolt against formal gardens had been fanned by writers of all kinds, among them Addison and Pope, with his ridicule of topiary work —"A Quickset Hog shot up into a Porcupine by being forgot a week in rainy weather" —and when in 1750 "Capability" Brown was appointed royal gardener, garden owners all over England let themselves go in a riot of realistic landscape. The Hermit. A certain Charles Hamilton, saj-s Mr. Richardson Wright, had in his grounds near Cobliam "a hermitage, and maintained in it an aged man who acted as a realistic hermit—but not for long. He was to be provided with a Bible, glasses, a mat for bed, a hassock for pillow, an hour-glass for timepiece, and food from the house. He was to wear a robe, never shave or go beyond the grounds and never speak to the servants. If lie held the job seven years he was to be paid 700 guineas. , There was only one aspirant, and he lasted three weeks."

In France the Marquis l\ene do Girardin had in his garden, among other things, a flour mill, a temple of philosophy, many ruins, and a band of musicians who wandered about playing melancholy airs. He even persuaded his wife and children to dress as rustics so that they might be in keeping with his garden. As a monument to these times we have still in existence the pagoda in Kew gardens, although it now lacks its original glory of gilded dragons. Nineteen Million Nosegays. The vastness of Versailles and the eighteenth century gardens, with their grottos, hermits, Roman baths, and whatnots, are as grains of sand in the vast expanse of garden history. About the year 3.100 B.C. the Sumerians of the Euphrates Valley were growing onions along canal banks and planting barley in the meadows. The ancient Egyptians had walled gardens, placed pots of flowers and shrubs in front of their houses, and used flowers for decoration and funeral wreaths. "It was the proud boast of one of the Barneses," says Mr. Wright, "that he supplied the temples with no fewer than nineteen million nosegays!"

Gardens have grown with civilisation, anrl with civilisation they have gone | in cycles, so that even to-day we cannot I boast that there is anything very original about our gardens. The younger Pliny had his pergolas and summerhouses, Cicero his grottos and waterfalls, while, as Mr. Wright points out, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon have their counterpart in the roof gardens of New York. England's chief contribution to this centuries long story is the lawn.