KELLIE CASTLE

Kellie Castle in Fifeshire, very near Balcaskie, is another house of the finest type of old Scottish architecture. The basement is vaulted in solid masonry, the ground-Hoor rooms have a height of fourteen feet; the old hall, now the drawing-room, is nearly fifty feet long. A row of handsome stone dormers to an upper floor, light a set of bedrooms, which, as well as the main rooms below, have coved plaster ceilings of great beauty.   

There is no certain record of the date of the oldest part of the castle. It is assigned to the fourteenth century, but may be older. The earliest actual date found upon the building is 1573, and it is considered that the mass of the castle, as we see it now, was completed by that date, though another portion bears the date 1606. It belonged of old to the Oliphants, a family that held it for two and a half centuries, when it passed by sale to an Erskine, who, early in the seventeenth century, became Earl of Kellie. In 1797, after the death of the seventh Earl, it was abandoned by the family and soon showed signs of deterioration from disuse. About thirty years later the Earldom of Kellie descended to the Earl of Mar, and the family seat being elsewhere, Kellie was allowed to go to ruin.   

In 1878 the ruined place was taken, to its salvation, on a long lease by Mr. James Lorimer, whose widow is the present occupier. It has undergone the most careful and reverent reparation. The broken roofs have been made whole, the walls are again hung with tapestries, and the rooms furnished with what might have been the original appointments.   

The castle stands at one corner of the old walled kitchen garden, a door in the north front opening directly into it. The garden has no architectural features. There are walks with high box edgings and quantities of simple flowers. Everywhere is the delightful feeling that there is about such a place when it is treated with such knowledge and sympathy as have gone to the re-making of Kellie as a delightful human habitation. For two sons of the house are artists of the finest faculty — painter and architect — and they have done for this grand old place what boundless wealth, in less able hands, could not have accomplished.   

Close to the house on its western side is a little glen, and in it a rookery. When strong winds blow in early spring the nests in the swaying tree-tops come almost within hand reach of the turret windows of the north-west tower.   

How the flowers grow in these northern gardens! Here they must needs grow tall to be in scale with the high box edging. But Shirley Poppies, when they are autumn sown, will rise to four feet, and the grand new strains of tall Snapdragons will go five and even over six feet in height.   

As the picture shows, this is just the garden for the larger plants — single Hollyhocks in big free groups, and double Hollyhocks too, if one can be sure of getting a good strain. For this is just the difficulty. The strains admired by the old-fashioned florist, with the individual flowers tight and round, are certainly not the best in the garden. The beautiful double garden Hollyhock has a wide outer frill like the corolla of the single flowers in the picture. Then the middle part, where the doubling comes, should not be too double. The waved and crumpled inner petals should be loosely enough arranged for the light to get in and play about, so that in some of them it is reflected, and in some transmitted. It is only in such flowers that one can see how rich and bright it can be in the reds and roses, or how subtle and tender in the whites and sulphurs and pale pinks. Other flowers beautiful in such gardens are the taller growing of the Columbines, the feathery herbaceous Spiraeas, such as .S. Aruncus, that displays its handsome leaves, and waves its creamy plumes, on the banks of Alpine torrents, and its brethren the lovely pale pink venusta, the bright rosy palmata and the cream-white Ulmaria, the garden form of the wild Meadow-sweet of our damp meadow-ditches. Then the tall Bocconia, with its important bluish leaves and feathery flower-beads, which shows in the picture in brownish seed-pod; and the Thalictrums, pale yellow and purple, and Canterbury Bells, and Lilies yellow and white, and the tall broad-leaved Bell-flowers.   

All these should be in these good gardens, besides the many kinds or Scotch Briers, and big bushes of the old, almost forgotten garden Roses of a hundred years ago, many of which are no longer to be found, except now and then in these old gardens of Scotland. For here some gardens seem to have escaped that murderously overwhelming wave of fashion for tender bedding plants alone, that wrought such havoc throughout England during three decades of the last century.   

Here, too, are Roses trained in various pretty simple ways. Our garden Roses come from so many different wild plants, from all over the temperate world, that there is hardly an end to the number of ways in which they can be used. Some of them, like the Scotch Briers, grow in close bushy masses; some have an upright habit; some like to rush up trees and over hedges; others again will trail along the ground and even run downhill. Some are tender and must have a warm wall; some will endure severe cold; some will flower all the summer; others at one season only. So it is that we find in various gardens, Roses grown in many different ways. In one as small bushes in beds, or budded on standards, in another as the covering of a pergola, or as fountain roses, throwing up many stems which arch over naturally. Some of the oldest garden Roses, such as The Garland, Dundee Rambler and Bennett's Seedling are the best for this kind of use.   

The Himalayan R. polyantha will grow in this way into a huge bush, sometimes as much from thirty to forty feet in diameter, and many of the beautiful modern garden Roses that have polyantha for a near ancestor, will do well in the same way, though none of them attain so great a size. Roses grown like this take a form with, roughly speaking, a semi-circular outline, like an inverted basin. If they are wanted to take a shape higher in proportion they must be trained through or over some simple