Sylva dealing with forest trees, there were a hundred hints to all lovers of nature

and of gardens, for your good gardener is a man very near in his nature to a good
strong tree, and loves to observe the play of light and shade in the branches of those
that give shade to his garden walks.

Evelyn tells us how the Ash is the sweetest of forest fuelling, and the fittest for
Ladies Chambers, also for the building of Arbours, the staking of Espaliers, and
the making of Poles. The white rot of it makes a ground for the Sweet-powder used
by gallants. He tries to introduce the Chestnut as food, saying how it is a good,
lusty and masculine food for Rustics; and commenting on the fact that the best
tables in France and Italy make them a service. He tells us how the water in which
Walnut 101 husks and leaves are boiled poured on the carpet of walks and bowling-
greens infallibly kills the worms without hurting the grass. That, by the way, is a
matter for discussion among gardeners, seeing that some say that the movements of
worms from below the surface to their cast on the lawn lets air among the grass
roots and is good for them.

He tells us how the Horn-beam makes the stateliest hedge for long garden walks.
He advises us how to make wine of the Birch, Ash, Elder, Oak, Crab and Bramble.
He praises the Service-Tree, and the Eugh, and the Jasmine, saying of this last how
one sorry tree in Paris where they grow has been worth to a poor woman, near
twenty shillings a year.

All this and much besides of diverting and instructive reading, varied with remarks
on the gardens of his friends and acquaintances, as when he cannot but applaud
the worthy Industry of old Sir Harbotle Grimstone, who (I am told) from a very
small Nursery of Acorns which he sowed in the neglected corners of his ground, did
draw forth such numbers of Oaks of competent growth; as being planted about
his Fields in even and uniform rows, about one hundred foot from the Hedges;
bushd and well waterd till they had sufficiently fixd themselves, did wonderfully
improve both the beauty, and the value of his Demeasnes, for the honour and glory
of filling England with fine trees and gardens to improve, what he callsthe
Landskip.

The exigencies of the present moment when Imperial Finance threatens to tax all
good parks and orchards out of existence, and to make all fine flower gardens out
of use, except to the enormously wealthy, makes the Gardners Calendar all the
more interesting as showing what manner of flowers, fruits, and
vegetables 102 were in use in the Seventeenth Century, and the means employed to
grow and preserve them.

Then, as now, there was a danger of over cultivation of certain plants and flowers,
so that a man might have more pride in the number and curiosity of his flowers,
than in the beauty and colour of them. It is a certain fault in modern gardeners that
they do not study the grouping and massing of colours, but do, more generally, take
pride in over-large specimens, great collections, and rare varieties. But this age and
that are times of collecting, of connoisseurship, ages that produce us great art of
their own but have an extraordinary knowledge of the arts and devices of the past.
Not that I would decry the friendly competitions of this and that man to grow rare
rock plants, or bloom exotics the one against another, but I do most certainly prefer
a rivalry in producing beautiful effects of colour; and love better to see a great mass
of Roses growing free than to see one poor tree twisted into the semblance of a
flowering parasol as men now use in many of the small climbing Roses.

To the end that gardeners and lovers of gardens may know how those past
gardeners treated their fruits and flowers, I give the whole of Evelyns Gardners
Calendar, than which no more complete account of gardens of that time exists.

It would be as well to note, before arriving at our Seventeenth Century Calendar,

how the art of gardening had grown in England after the time of the Romans.

From the time that every sign of the Roman occupation had been wiped out to the
beginning of the thirteenth century, gardens as we know them to-day did not exist.
The first attempts at gardens within castle walls were little plots of herbs and shrubs
with a few trees of Costard Apples. It appears that all those plants and flowers the
Romans cultivated had been lost, and that 103 with the sterner conditions of living
all such arrangements as arbours of cut Yew trees, or elaborate Box-edged paths
had completely vanished. Certainly they did have arbours for shade, but of a simple
kind and quite unlike the elaborate garden houses the Romans built.

There were vineyards and wine made from them as early as the Eighth Cen