Ruskin Relics

often make their gardens into museums; very interesting, no doubt, but not so pleasant to live with as the half-wild bit of ground-lawn, trees and shrubbery, without a p

at; a pleasance, where He could walk in the cool of the evening with A

ning was quite the landscapist. He liked making paths and contriving pretty nooks, building steps and bridges, laying out beds, woodcutting and so forth; but I never remember him potting and grafting and

and picturesque beauty as anything can be in this northern climate. But they are not Ruskin's gardens. When the first glass-house went up, he used to apologise for it to his visitors; it was to please Mrs. Severn; it was to grow a fe

, and if it is all that travellers tell us, he might have written some enthusiastic passages on a people who love stones for their own sake and tub themselves daily. To him, his rock gardens were a joy for ever; and in his working years he set an example of Lake-district landscape-gardening which still, for all I know, remains unfollowed, and is worth a few paragraphs of record. You can see little of

RANTWOOD DOOR. By

fy thicket is rased away, leaving bare earth and hacked stumps and the toppings strewn about to rot into soil; but next spring there are sure to be galaxies of primroses, if not daffodils and bluebells to follow, and foxgloves as the summer goes on; and so the kindness of nature heals the wound. Next year there are shoots from the stubs, a miniature forest which might even attract a Japanese; and as the saplings grow the flowers thin out, until in two or three seasons the children wonder why there are no primroses in the primrose-wood, and can

into an early Italian altar-piece. Among those slender-pillared aisles you would not be surprised to see goddesses appear out of the green depths; and looking westward, the sun-dazzle of the lake and the dark blue of the mountains gazed in between the leaves. It was what the old Venetians had seen in landward holidays and tried to remember for their backgrounds. That in itself was o

, trailed over with creepers. The fourth side was unfenced, but parted from the wood by a deep and steep watercourse, a succession of cascades (unless the weather were dry, which is not often the case at Coniston) over hard

o please him with unusually rude lines, had made the planks so flimsy that it was hardly safe. He insisted on solidity and security, though hi

RESERVOIR

osses of rock pushing through the soil, and each with its special inte

he little r

head th

. He was the engineer, and the work was done in great part by the young people who were to play tennis on the ground when it was levelled-a rather distant hope, but eventually fulfilled. The tall, thin saplings have run up higher and higher all round the green: on one side you look through their veil to the long expanse of lake; on the other, up the dark, wooded hill; and on a sunny afternoon it has a curious touch of poetry. There is no st

he would have planted his field with narcissus, scattered thinly among the grass, to surprise you with a reminiscence of Vevey? And in the old garden below, though he did not create it, you can trace his feeling in the terraced zigzag of paths, hedged with apple and the cotoneaster which flourishes at Coniston,

it after the original wild growth of oak and birch and holly had been cleared away by the charcoal-burners and sheep-farmers of past centuries. Strongly marked ridges of slate-rock cropped out slantwise, across and across the slope, their backs tufted over with heather and juniper, and their hollows holding water in sodden quagmires. Down the slope, from the bogs of the great moor behind, rising to a thousand feet above the sea in some places, there were two little streamlets which leapt the ridges and pooled in the hollows among ferns and mosses. All the green fields and farms of the dalesmen were once made out of such ground

MOORLAN

and the old game of the Hinksey diggings was played over again. For what reason I never clearly understood, juniper was condemned on the moor as convolvulus in the wood: and every savin-bush, as it is called in the district, was to be uprooted, while the heather was treasured, in

lever handles, artistically curved, to shut and open the slit. One would have thought, sometimes, to see his eagerness over these inventions, that he had missed his vocation; and he had indeed a keen admiration for the civil engineer, wherever the road and bridge, mine and harbour, did not come into o

cranberries, and some apple- and cherry-trees were put in, where the soil was deep and drainage provided. No wall or wire parted this little space of tillage from the wilder moor and its rabbits, for the design was to enlarge the cultivated area and make the moor a paradise of terraces like the top of the purgatorial mount in Dante; and since this fragment of an exp

om out the

lender spri

niature ravine; and as perhaps it may-for no one can foretell the fate of any sacred spot-when the p