You come out of the cool shadowy house on to the warm garden, in the summer, and there is a scared flutter of white pigeons up to the roof as you open the door. You have to look twice before you are sure whether they are pigeons or magnolias. The turf is of the most brilliant green; there is a sound of bees in the limes; the heat quivers like watered gauze above the ridge of the lawn. The garden is entirely enclosed by a high wall of rag, very massively built, and which perhaps dates back to the time of the archbishops; its presence, I think, gives a curious sense of seclusion and quiet. Inside the walls are herbaceous borders on either side of long green walks, and little square orchards planted with very old apple-trees, under which grow iris, snapdragon, larkspur, pansies, and such-like humble flowers. There are also interior walls, with rounded archways through which one catches a sight of the house, so that the garden is conveniently divided up into sections without any loss of the homogeneity of the whole. Half of the garden, roughly speaking, is formal; the other half is woodland, called the Wilderness, mostly of beech and chestnut, threaded by mossy paths which in spring are thick with bluebells and daffodils.
The old engravings show the gardens to have been, from the seventeenth century onwards, very much the same as they are at present. There are a few minor variations, but as the early engravers were not very particular as to accuracy their evidence cannot be accepted as wholly reliable. We have, besides these engravings, a fairly large number of records relating to both the park and gardens. The earliest of these that I have been able to trace is dated 1456, to the effect that Archbishop Bourchier in that year enclosed the park—a smaller area then than is covered by it now; and in 1468 there is a bill, “Paid for making 1000 palings for the enclosure of the Knole land, 6_s._ 8_d._” But the first accounts for the garden proper appear to date from the reign of Henry VIII (State papers of Henry VIII), when, in 1543, Sir Richard Longe was paid “for making the King’s garden at Knole.” Then there is a gap of nearly a century, save for the references to the garden in Lady Anne Clifford’s Diary, such as “_25th October, 1617_. My Lady Lisle and my Coz: Barbara Sidney [came?] and I walked with them all the Wilderness over. They saw the Child and much commended her. I gave them some marmalade of quince, for about this time I made much of it”; and her constant notes of how she took her prayer-book “up to the standing” [which I take to be what we now call the Duchess’ Seat], or of how she picked cherries in the garden with the French page, and he told her how he thought that all the men in the house loved her. For the year 1692, however, there are some bills among the Knole papers, such as “Mr. Olloynes, gardener, wages £12 per annum,” and some bills for seeds and roots, “Sweet yerbs, pawsley, sorrill, spinnig, spruts, leeks, sallet, horse-rydish, jerusalem hawty-chorks,” and another bill for seeds for £2. 0_s._ 5_d._ Coming to the eighteenth century, there are more detailed accounts, amongst others an agreement of what was expected in those days of a head gardener and the remuneration he might hope to receive: