Monastery Gardens.—When the possessions of others were plundered, the sacred property of the Church was respected, and to the monks, with their culinary and medical plants, is ascribed the first mention of gardens and orchards in England, in or about the i 2th century. The evidences which have come down to us go to prove that for a century or two these monastic gardens existed in order to supply the monastery with food and fruit, and that it was purely a matter of profit or loss for the gardeners entrusted with them. With men of refined and scholarly ideas, as many of the monks were, there must have been design in these early gar dens, but we have no direct evidence of it.
Although in the first mention of monastery gardens they appear to have existed solely for vegetable and fruit, as time progressed we find, after a lapse of two centuries from the 12th to the 14th, that the one circumscribed domain increased to include ornamen tal gardens all within the monastery walls, and flowers, such as roses, appear in their inventories, to crown the priests on certain high days. These ornamental spaces surrounding the ecclesiastical edifices gradually assumed the character of design, until we hear of royal gardens being made for the Plantagenet kings at their seats of Westminster, the Tower, Charing and Windsor. We read of Henry III. commanding his bailiff to make at Woodstock a garden enclosed by walls, wherein was an herbarium and a fish-pond, "whereat the queen may be able to amuse herself." Thus with the monastic fish-ponds and the runnels of water, the sequestered cloister gardens laid down to quiet expanses of grass for medita tion, and the bowers and arbours, the flowers grown for priestly purposes and for decorating the churches on high days, we have all the elements accumulating which go to the making of a garden. Out of the none too plentiful evidence to be gleaned from writers of this period of English history, notably from Chaucer and Lang land, we can put together a fairly comprehensive list of features and flowers which of themselves opened up scope for the play of fancy, and formed a basis of design in their artistic arrangement.
Practically all the features of the mediaeval gardens have been demolished, but the one that has survived destruction is the fish pond which supplied the needs of the monks on fast days.
Stately houses have been built with gardens on the delectable sites of many of these old monasteries, and the fish-stews have been incorporated (in many cases with amplification) into the design, as for example at Woburn, Welbeck, Burghley, Sion, Beaulieu, Audley End, etc.
Undoubtedly, in the latter part of this mediaeval period, gar dens of royalty and the nobility were designed and pleasingly contrived for effect, and were always more or less protected by a high wall in a style which was distinctly English, and were not trammelled to any large ex tent by foreign influences. It is to be remembered that during the reign of King John, the barons and nobility secured their inde pendence by the terms of Magna Carta and henceforward, since the kings had given them the lead, they began to frame for them selves secluded gardens at first within the protecting walls of their castles and moats. Then in the comparative peace which followed the English conquests on the Continent and the Wars of the Roses, the nobles and barons essayed to make gardens in the open country; then the rich merchants of the city of London followed suit. The material was there, and with the country's progress towards the attainment of freedom and opulence the arts kept pace, and gardens likewise.