it.

The inventory also gives some details of cultivation work that was necessary to various parts of the garden: manuring, cutting, pruning, nailing (presumably of espaliers), in addition to implied maintenance of lawns, bowling greens and walkways.

The paper was drawn up by George London, the King’s Master Gardener, and the £55 cost of reparation work ‘to put the gardens and plantations in as good repair as they were before his Zarrish Majestie resided there’, is ‘certified’ and ‘Justified’ by his signature. The sum was duly paid out of the royal coffers. Evelyn had some revenge in the 1706 edition of his Sylva:

Is there under the heavens a more glorious and refreshing object of the kind than an impregnable hedge of about 400 feet in length, nine feet high, andfive in diameter, which I can still show in my ruined garden at Sayes Court (thanks to the Tzar of Muscovy) at any time of year, glittering with its armed and variegated leaves, the taller standards at ordinary distance, blushing with their natural coral? It mocks the rudest assaults of the weather, beasts or hedge-breakers, et illum nemo impune lacessit

Other than the boggling dimensions of the hedge, it is striking to see that he defines the species by personal memoir, and more broadly, by its relative resilience to human impact.

Beneath George London’s £55 estimate comes the second ‘head’: that which cannot be repaired:

Great damages are done to the trees and plants, which cannot be repaired, as the breaking of branches of the wall fruit trees, spoiling two or