There is a whole range of possible beautiful treatment in fruit-growing that is rarely carried out or even attempted. Hitherto but little has been done to make the fruit garden a place of beauty; we find it almost flaunting its unloveliness, its white painted orchard-houses and vineries, its wires and wire nettings. It is not to be denied that all these are necessary, and that the usual and most obvious way of working them does not make for beauty. But in designing new gardens or remodelling old, on a rather large scale, there need be no difficulty in so arranging that all that is necessarily unbeautiful should be kept in one department, so hedged or walled around as to be out of sight.

In addition to such a fruit garden for strict utility I have in mind a walled enclosure of about an acre and a half, longer than wide, laid out as shown in the plan. I have seen in large places just such spaces, actually walled but put to no use.

The wall has trained fruit-trees—Peaches spreading their goodly fans, Pears showing long, level lines, and, including hardy Grape Vines, giving all the best exposition of the hardy fruit-grower's art. Next to the wall is a space six feet wide for ample access to the fruit-trees, their pruning, training and root-management; then a fourteen-foot plant border, wholly for beauty, and a path eight feet wide. At a middle point on all four sides the high wall has an arched doorway corresponding to the grassy way between the fruit-trees in the middle space. If the wall has some symmetrical building on the outside of each angle so much the better; the garden can make use of all. One may be a bothy, with lower extension out of sight; one a half-underground fruit-store, with bulb-store above; a third a paint-shop, and a fourth a tea-house.

The middle space is all turf; in the centre a Mulberry, and, both ways across, double lines of fruit-trees, ending with Bays; the Bays are at the ends on the plan. In almost any part of the sea-warmed south of England, below the fifty-first parallel of latitude which passes through the upper part of Sussex, the rows of fruit-trees on the green might be standard Figs; elsewhere they would be bush Pears and Apples. If the soil is calcareous, so much the better for the Figs and Mulberry, the Vines and indeed nearly all the fruits. The angle-clumps in the grass are planted with Magnolias, Yuccas and Hydrangeas.

The border all round is for small shrubs and plants of some solidity or importance; the spaces are too long for an ordinary flower border. It would have a good bush of Magnolia stellata at each angle, Yuccas, Tritomas, hardy Fuchsias, Peonies, Euphorbia Wulfenii, Hollyhocks, Dahlias, Hydrangeas, Michaelmas Daisies, Flag Iris, the beautiful Olearia Gunni and[Pg 129]
[Pg 130] O. Haastii, Tree Lupines, Forsythia, Weigela, the smaller Bush SpirÆas, Veronicas, Tamarisk, the large-bloomed Clematises, bush kinds of garden Roses, Funkias, and so on.

Surely my fruit garden would be not only a place of beauty, of pleasant sight and pleasant thought, but of leisurely repose, a repose broken only faintly and in welcome fashion by its own interests—in July, August and September a goodly place in which to wander and find luscious fruits in quantity that can be gathered and eaten straight from the tree. There is a pleasure in searching for and eating fruit in this way that is far better than having it picked by the gardener and brought in and set before one on a dish in a tame room. Is this feeling an echo of faraway days of savagery when men hunted for their food and rejoiced to find it, or is it rather the poet's delight of having direct intercourse with the good gift of the growing thing and seeing and feeling through all the senses how good and gracious the thing is? To pass the hand among the leaves of the Fig-tree, noting that they are a little harsh upon the upper surface and yet soft beneath; to be aware of their faint, dusky scent; to see the cracking of the coat of the fruit and the yellowing of the neck where it joins the branch—the two indications of ripeness—sometimes made clearer by the drop of honeyed moisture at the eye; then the handling of the fruit itself, which must needs be gentle because the tender coat is so readily bruised and torn; at the same time observing the slight greyish bloom and the colouring—low-toned transitions of purple and green; and finally to have the enjoyment of the luscious pulp, with the knowledge that it is one of the most wholesome and sustaining of fruit foods—surely all this is worthy garden service! Then how delicious are the sun-warmed Apricots and Peaches, and, later in the year, the Jargonelle Pears, always best eaten straight from the tree; and the ripe Mulberries of September. And how pleasant to stroll about the wide grassy ways, turning from the fruits to the flowers in the clumps and borders, to the splendid Yuccas and the masses of Hydrangea bloom, and then to the gorgeous Tritomas and other delights; and to see the dignity of the stately Bay-trees and the incomparable beauty of their every twig and leaf.

The beautiful fruit garden would naturally lead to the orchard, a place that is not so often included in the pleasure-ground as it deserves. For what is more lovely than the bloom of orchard-trees in April and May, with the grass below in its strong, young growth; in itself a garden of Cowslips and Daffodils. In an old orchard how pictorial are the lines of the low-leaning old Apple-trunks and the swing and poise of their upper branches, best seen in winter when their graceful movement of line and wonderful sense of balance can be fully appreciated. But the younger orchard has its beauty too, of fresh, young life and wealth of bloom and bounteous bearing.

Then if the place of the orchard suggests a return to nearer pleasure-ground with yet some space between, how good to make this into a free garden orchard for the fruits of wilder character; for wide-spreading Medlars, for Quinces, again some of the most graceful of small British trees; for Service, Damson, Bullace, Crabs and their many allies, not fruit-bearing trees except from the birds' and botanists' points of view, but beautiful both in bloom and berry, such as the Mountain Ash, Wild Cherry, Blackthorn, and the large-berried White-thorns, Bird-cherry, White Beam, Holly and Amelanchier. Then all these might be intergrouped with great brakes of the free-growing Roses and the wilder kinds of Clematis and Honeysuckle. And right through it should be a shady path of Filberts or Cobnuts arching overhead and yielding a bountiful autumn harvest.