Granny's garden at Crayke

I haven't posted any of Granny's memoirs for quite some time, so, to fit in with the garden theme of my blog at the moment, here is an exerpt about the garden at Crayke.
 " The garden at Crayke was a perpetual delight to us. We had a good gardener called Taylor, who, with the help of his son Tom, kept the lawns, the greenhouse, the vegetable garden, the flowers and the fruit trees all in good order. We grew enough vegetables and potatoes to keep us all the year round, and usually had plenty of apples and pears. Taylor must have worked very hard. He pumped all the water for the house as well. We had a WC but no bathroom. There was an earth closet in the garden and another for the maids, in the yard.
There were window boxes at the front windows filled with double pink creeping geraniums and lobelias. By the drawing room steps there was a jasmine plant and the scent of white jasmine always takes me back to Crayke. Lilacs and laburnums grew round the side lawn where we often played croquet. There were plenty of trees in the garden which we could climb and others, like the big elm trees, which had no low branches.

The garden was laid out in terraces down the hillside.  The top terrace was wide enough to skip along and bowl our hoops.  There were hyacinths growing in the border and one year Mother hid my Easter egg amongst the hyacinths.  Berberis grew on the bank above... Along the lower terrace were the gooseberry bushes and on the bottom one, the strawberries, but they never did very well.  Beyond the strawberries were rhubarb and horseradish, and two lovely lilac bushes." 

It does sound an idyllic garden to grow up with and there will be more about this garden in my next post.