POET John Milton was a keen botanist. His 'pretty garden-house' in London was a profusion of colour. KATHLEEN ADKINS reports on the garden at his cottage in Chalfont St Giles which has been created in his memory.

John Milton's garden at Chalfont St Giles is now a lovely, well-stocked English cottage garden, but when Milton came here in 1665 to escape the plague, it was open ground surrounded by a rolling green Chiltern countryside.

Unfortunately, the poet would not have been able to enjoy the view as by this time he was blind.

He would only have heard the hens clucking and insects around him; listened to the cattle lowing from their sheds; been able to smell, perhaps stroke, their sweaty flanks; and been aware of the bees buzzing and crickets in the clover, sanicle and meadow buttercups, which grew in profusion beyond the cottage.

Milton was a keen botanist. The flowers in his "pretty garden-house" in Aldersgate Street, London, before his blindness, were arranged in blending harmonies of colour throughout spring, summer and autumn.

He also had a "garden-house" later at Westminster in 1652, when he had lost his sight altogether.

However, only his residence at Chalfont St Giles survives, so the Milton Cottage Trust has set out the garden to reflect Milton's life-long horticultural interests.

In the house is kept a book, The Flowers of Milton, by Jane Elizabeth Giraud. It contains delicate, hand-coloured plates of the multitude of flowers and plants referred to by Milton in his lavish, sensuous English verse.

Many specimens now grow in the Chalfont garden. The visual profusion is evident everywhere from pansies, pinks and gaudy daffodils to carnations, glowing violets and irises of all hues.

Milton was steeped in the classics. Dr Johnson complained that Milton used English words with a foreign idiom yet John Dryden described Paradise Lost as "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems this nation has produced".

It is impossible to imagine Milton creating such grandeur and magnificence without the dramatic metre and rhythm inspired by the Latin and Greek languages.

To celebrate this enthusiasm, the acanthus shrub (Plant of Resurrection) with its spiked crowns of white flowers has been planted. Its leaves are used in classic tradition to decorate Corinthian columns.

Then there is the Archangel Michael's Greek Euphrasie (eye-bright) referred to in Paradise Lost, with its hairy-toothed leaves used, ironically for Milton, to treat eye diseases, and also the fragrant asphodel or affodil (the narcissus or Lent Lily), a supposedly immortal flower growing in Elysium.

Here is a species aptly called Puritan Maid. Another flower with political connotations is the Californian Poppy over the hazel arbour. The Americans greatly admired Milton for his radical views on freedom of speech and non-censorship of the press, which are written into the second Amendment of their Constitution.

Milton's delight in language was not confined to classical origins. He describes with exuberance the "jessamine" and "daffadillies", the "wild thyme and gadding vine o'ergrown", and "ivy canopied and interwove with flaunting honeysuckle".

Then there are the strongly fragrant herbs. They are not to be found all together in one herb bed but are distributed throughout the garden, as was more usual in the 17th century.

It meant that their odour could be savoured individually rather than overpower the senses en masse and for Milton, in his blindness at Westminster, no doubt would have provided valuable garden location points, rosemary for example, attracting many a bee "with honeyed thigh that at her flowey work doth sing". Milton must also have stroked the silky silver "cassia" with its spicy, "balmy smells", and caressed the "cowslip's velvet head" and "the savoury herb of knot-grass dew-besprent".

That Milton keenly appreciated perfume even when sighted is evident from his eulogies of "beds of hyacinth and roses", the aromatic myrtle, the fragrant white "musk rose" and "the twisted eglantine" with its apple-scented foliage.

Beneath a resinous fir tree is Milton's Memorial Plot, with his alabaster bust, and in front, on the parterre, bloom forget-me-nots of an unusual deep blue and velvet pansies (pensees) "freak't with jet".

In this garden, Milton must have risen to the crowing cockerel, "early ere the odorous breath of morn awakes the slumbering leaves", a tolling bell wafting on the breeze, though Non-Conformist Milton would not be at church, despite his early aspirations to the cloth.

While a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, Milton enjoyed sitting under a mulberry tree and from one of its roots there now flourishes another mulberry tree in the Chiltern garden beside the 400-year-old well.

With the Restoration in 1660, 15 years of hard work for the Parliamentary cause were swept aside. Disillusioned and blind, Milton withdrew from politics and came to Chalfont St Giles where he finished his epic poem Paradise Lost.

Perhaps this quiet retreat so close to nature, reconciled him and gave him the serenity and wisdom to accept, in the words of his own sonnet on his blindness, "they also serve who only stand and wait".

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