3-077-659 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

English Homes - No. XXIII: Belvoir Castle: corner view from the Private Gardens, 1890. Estate in Leicestershire, seat of the Duke of Rutland. 'Just down the slope in front of the castle is the charming little Statue Garden: you cannot see it from the glacis, though it is so near that you may almost smell the violets - here blooming in their multitudes in the first week in December. But flowers and cannon hardly go together, and, besides, one likes a garden to be quite private; so this one is ensconced beneath a little ridge of the hill. Statues of heathen deities and Chinese monsters stand among the violets and primroses, and the crowds of other flowers that make the little nook gay in their seasons@Just round the corner of the first hill is perhaps the most beautiful sight to be seen at Belvoir: the loveliest garden, it is said, in England, and the most interesting. For not far short of thirty years Mr. William Ingram, one of the ablest of English horticulturists, has been working at this and the other gardens of Belvoir; and he has made them not only things of beauty but teachers of the history of the earth, lovely pictures to illustrate the "fairy tales of science".' From "Illustrated London News", 1890.