Temple, William; Sieveking, Albert Forbes: Upon the gardens of Epicurus: with other XVIIth century garden essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908)

XX

INTRODUCTION

pagoda-garden of Cathay—which long swayed the
garden-design of Europe, as Chambers’s Kew and
Essay on Chinese Gardening and Pere Attiret’s
writings still testify—whether it steep you in the
Canary intoxication of Mrs. Stepney Rawson’s mid-
Atlantic “ Enchanted Garden,” or twine about the ear
and memory in the honeysuckle tendrils of the Comtesse
Matthieu de Noailles’ verse, or the cadences of Mrs.
Meynell’s or Vernon Lee’s prose, or merely buzzes
and flutters around in the anarithmic swarms of latter-
day Garden-Diaries—those twentieth-century “ Books
of Beauty ”—
O Jardins assouplis, pelouses caressees !
Everywhere in Life and Letters the Spirit of the
Time and of the Garden walk hand in hand and cast
their spell over our souls and bodies—
Tout engines des semes du Jardin.'
But let us stop rhapsodising and return to Temple.
One minor point in regard to Temple’s work and
life need puzzle his readers no longer. The two
so-called Moor Parks—in Hertfordshire and Surrey
—were respectively Moor Park and More Park.
The house in which Temple last lived and died is
written thrice in his (probably) holograph Will, and