yew hedges which should accompany it are the best possible protection for their flowers; and that there is nothing flowers need so much as shelter, the nursery-grounds, where almost alone these hedges are now retained, will testify. Where they already exist, even in a situation where shelter is not required, and where yet a good view is shut out, we should prefer cutting windows or niches in the solid hedge to removing it altogether. In conjunction with these, what can be handsomer than the iron tracery-work which came into fashion with the Dutch style, and of which Hampton Court affords so splendid an example? Good screens of this work,* which on their first introduction were called clair-voyées, may be seen at Oxford in Trinity and New College Gardens. Some years ago we heard of a proposition to remove the latter: the better taste of the present day will not, we think, renew the scheme. Though neither of these are in the rich flamboyant style which is sometimes seen, there is still character enough about them to assure us that, were they destroyed, nothing so good would be put up in their place. Oxford has already lost too many of its characteristic alleys and parterres. The last sweep was at the Botanic Garden, where, however, the improvements recently introduced by the zeal and liberality of the present Professor must excuse it. If any college-garden is again to be reformed, we hope that the fellows will have courage enough to lay it out in a style which is at once classical and monastic; and set Pliny's example against Walpole's sneer, that in an age when architecture displayed all its grandeur, all its purity, and all its taste; when arose Vespasian's amphitheatre, the temple of Peace, Trajan's forum, Domitian's baths, and Adrian's villa, the ruins and vestiges of which still excite our astonishment and curiosity,-a Roman consul, a polished emperor's friend, and a man of elegant literature and taste, delighted in what the mob now scarce admire in a college-garden.' He little thought how soon sturdy Oxford would follow in the fashion of the day, and blunt the point of his period. Still more astonished would he have been to have had his natural style traced to no less a founder than Nero, and even the names of the Bridgeman and Brown of the day handed down for his edification.†

The

We were surprised, the first time we saw the entrance-gates at Althorpe, which are of this description, painted sky-blue and gilt, till by chance we fell upon a passage in Evelyn, who speaks of them (we suppose they are the same) thus coloured in his time. The mention of them by him has rendered them classical, and we quite approve of the taste which renews them as he described.

Tacitus, in the Sixth Book of his Annals,' gives us this information:- Ceterum Nero usus est patriæ ruinis, extruxitque domum, in quâ haud perinde gemmæ et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem et luxu vulgata, quam arva et stagna et in modum solitudinum hinc sylvæ, inde aperta spatia et prospectus; magistris et machinatoribus

The same train of thought is followed out in The Poetry of Gardening

Who to whom the elegance and gentlemanliness and poetry-the Boccaccio-spirit-of a scene of Watteau is familiar, does not regret the devastation made by tasty innovators upon the grounds laid out in the times of the Jameses and the Charleses? As for old Noll, I am certain, though I have not a jot of evidence, that he cared no more for a garden than for an anthem; he would as lief have sacrificed the verdant sculpture of a yew-peacock as the time-honoured tracery of a cathedral shrine; and his crop-eared soldiery would have had as great satisfaction in bivouacking in the parterres of a "royal pleasaunce" as in the presence-chamber of a royal palace. It were a sorrow beyond tears to dwell on the destruction of garden-stuff in those king-killing times. Thousands, doubtless, of broad-paced terraces and trim vegetable conceits sunk in the same ruin with their masters and mansions; and alas! modern taste has followed in the footsteps of ancient fanaticism. How many old associations have been rooted up with the knotted stumps of yew and hornbeam! And Oxford too in the van of reform! Beautiful as are St. John's gardens, who would not exchange them for the very walks and alleys along which Laud, in all the pardonable pride of collegiate lionising, conducted his illustrious guests, Charles and Henrietta? Who does not grieve that we must now inquire in vain for the bowlinggreen in Christchurch where Cranmer solaced the weariness of his last confinement? And who in lately reading Scott's Life but must have mourned in sympathy with the poet over the destruction of the "huge hill of leaves," and the yew and hornbeam hedges of "The Garden" at Kelso?'

The good taste of the proprietors of Hardwick and Levens still retains these gardens as nearly as possible in their original state; but places like these are yearly becoming more curious from their rarity. We have heard of one noble but eccentric lord, the Elgin of the topiary art, who is buying up all the yew-peacocks in the country to form an avenue in his domain. Meanwhile the lilacs of Nonsuch, and the orange-trees of Beddington, are no more. The fish-pools of Wanstead are dry; the terraces of Moor-park are levelled. Even that impregnable hedge of holly'-the pride of Evelyn-than which a more glorious and refreshing object' did not exist under heaven-' one hundred and sixty foot in length, seven foot high, and five in diameter— which he could show in his 'poor gardens at any time of the year, glitt'ring with its arm'd and vernish'd leaves-the taller standards. at orderly distances, blushing with their natural corall'-that

chinatoribus Severo et Celere, quibus ingenium et audacia erat, etiam quæ natura denegavisset per artem tentare, et viribus principis illudere.' We since learn from Loudon's Encyclopædia,' sec. 1145, that this passage was suggested by Forsyth to Walpole, who promised to insert it in the second edition of his Essay,' but failed to

do so.

mocked at the rudest assaults of the weather, the beasts, or hedge-breaker-even this is vanished without a solitary sucker to show where it once stood. Proof it long was against the wind and weather,' nay, against time itself, but not against the autocratic pleasure of a barbarian Czar. The beast' and the hedgebreaker' were united in the person of Peter the Great, whose great pleasure, when studying at Deptford, was to be driven in a wheelbarrow, or drive one himself, through this very hedge, which its planter deemed impregnable! If he had ever heard, which he probably had not, of Evelyn's boast, he might have thus loved to illustrate the triumph of despotic will and brute force over the most amiable and simple affections; but at any rate the history of this hedge affords a curious instance not only of the change of gardening taste, but of the mutability and strangeness of all earthly things.

No associations are stronger than those connected with a garden. It is the first pride of an emigrant settled on some distant shore to have a little garden as like as he can make it to the one he left at A pot of violets or mignionette is one of the highest luxuries to an Anglo-Indian. In the bold and picturesque scenery of Batavia, the Dutch can, from feeling, no more dispense with their little moats round their houses than they could, from necessity, in the flat swamps of their native land. Sir John Hobhouse discovered an Englishman's residence on the shore of the Hellespont by the character of his shrubs and flowers. Louis XVIII. on his restoration to France made in the park of Versailles the fac-simile of the garden at Hartwell; and there was no more amiable trait in the life of that accomplished prince. Napoleon used to say that he should know his father's garden in Corsica blindfold by the smell of the earth; and the hanging gardens of Babylon are said to have been raised by the Median queen of Nebuchadnezzar on the flat and naked plains of her adopted country, to remind her of the hills and woods of her childhood.

Why should we speak of the plane-trees of Plato-Shakspere's mulberry-tree-Pope's willow-Byron's elm? Why describe Cicero at his Tusculum-Evelyn at Wooton-Pitt at Ham Common-Walpole at Houghton-Grenville at Dropmore? Why dwell on Bacon's little tufts of thyme,' or Fox's geraniums? There is a spirit in the garden as well as in the wood, and the lilies of the field' supply food for the imagination as well as materials for sermons.Talke of perfect happiness or pleasure,' says old Gerarde to the courteous and well-willing reader,' from his house in Holborn, within the suburbs of London'-' and what place was so fit for that as the garden-place wherein Adam was set to be the herbalist? Whither did the

poets

poets hunt for their sincere delights but into the gardens of Alcinous, of Adonis, and the orchards of the Hesperides? Where did they dream that heaven should be but in the pleasant garden of Elysium? Whither doe all men walke for their honest recreation but thither where the earth hath most beneficially painted her face with flourishing colours? And what season of the yeare more longed for than the spring, whose gentle breath enticeth forth the kindly sweets, and makes them yield their fragrant smells?'

And what country, we may add, so suited, and climate so attempered, to yield the full enjoyment of the pleasures and blessings of a garden, as our own? Everybody knows the remark of Charles II., first promulgated by Sir W. Temple, 'that there were more days in the year in which one could enjoy oneself in the open air in England than in any other portion of the known world.' This, which contains so complete an answer to the weathergrumblers of our island, bears also along with it a most encouraging truth to those who love to live in gardens.' There is no country that offers the like advantages to horticulture. Perhaps there is not one plant in the wide world wholly incapable of being cultivated in England. The mosses and lichens dragged from under the shows of Iceland, and the tenderest creepers of the tropical jungles, are alike subject to the art of the British gardener. Artificial heat and cold, by the due application of steam and manure, sun and shade, hot and cold water, and even icemattings, flues in every variety of pit, frame, conservative wall, conservatory, greenhouse, hothouse, and stove, seem to have realised every degree of temperature from Kamskatka to Sincapore. But apart from artificial means, the natural mildness of our sky is most favourable to plants brought from countries of either extreme of temperature; and, as their habits are better known and attended to, not a year passes without acclimatising many heretofore deemed too tender for the open air. deners are reasonably cautious in not exposing at once a newly-introduced exotic; and thus we know that when Parkinson wrote, in 1629, the larch, and the laurel-then called bay-cherry-were still protected in winter. We are now daily adding to the list of our hardy plants; hydrangeas, the tree-peony, fuchsias, salvias, altromærias, and Cape-bulbs, are now found, with little or no protection, to stand our mid-England winters.

Gar

Then we alone have in perfection the three main elements of gardening, flowers apart, in our lawns, our gravel, and our evergreens. It is the greatest stretch of foreign luxury to emulate these. The lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have

been

been supplied from the Kensington gravel-pits. It is not probably generally known that among our exportations are every year a large quantity of evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade. This may seem the more remarkable to those who fancy that, from the superiority of foreign climates, any English tree would bear a continental winter; but the bare appearance of the French gardens, mostly composed as they are of deciduous trees, would soon convince them of the contrary. It is not the severity or length of our December nights that generally destroys our more tender exotic plants, but it is the late frosts of April and May,-those nipping frosts,' which, coming on after the plant has enjoyed warmth enough to set the sap in action, freeze its life-blood to the heart's core, and cause it to wither and die. The late winter of 1837-8 proved this fact distinctly, which had hardly been sufficiently remarked before. That year, which cut down even our cypresses, and china-roses, and from which our gorse-fields have hardly yet recovered, while it injured nearly every plant and tree on south walls and in sheltered borders, and in all forward situations, spared the tenderest kinds on north walls and exposed places; and in Scotland the destruction was hardly felt at all. It was the backwardness of their growing state that saved these plants; and the knowledge of this fact has already been brought to bear in several recent experiments. The double yellow rose, for instance, one of the most delicate of its class, is now flowered with great success in a northern exposition. It has led men also to study the hybernation of plants-perhaps the most important research in which horticulturists have of late engaged; and it has been ascertained that this state of winter-rest is a most important element in their constitution; but no doubt it will also be found that-as the dormouse, the sloth, the snake, the mole, &c., undergo a greater or less degree of torpidity, and some require it not at all-so in plants, the length and degree will vary much in different species, and according to their state of artificial cultivation. As a general rule, young gardeners must take heed not prematurely to force the juices into action in spring, nor to keep them too lively in winter, unless they are well prepared with good and sufficient protection till all the frosts are over. The practical effect of these observations will be, that many plants which have hitherto only been cultivated by those who have had flues and greenhouses at their command, will now be grown in as great or greater perfection by those who can afford them a dry, though not a warm shelter. One instance may serve as an example: the scarlet geranium, one of the greatest treasures of our parterres, if taken up from the ground in autumn, after the

wood