CRITIQUE ON THE FEB. HORTICULTURIST. 



The hydraulic ram is of incalculable value in all places where a constant small rivulet 

 of water can be commanded — and we notice that in some parts of the country the farmers 

 use it for supplying their cattle-yards instead of digging wells. Ed. 



CRITIQUE ON THE FEBRUARY HORTICULTURIST. 



BY JEFFREYS. 



Citizens retiring into the Country. — You probably recollect the story in " Salmagun- 

 di," told by the meditative Launcelot Langstaff, of his "Uncle John," when on a 

 visit to him, then in his country retirement, enjoying a cheerful and merry old age; and 

 how the old gentleman related to his nephew, with all the vivacious garrulity of a boy, 

 what improvements he had made, and what more he was going to make; and how, a few 

 months after, our narrator was sorely shocked at the news of his uncle's death, just as he 

 had worked down comfortably into a bed of rocks, where he was blowing out a fish-pond! 



I fear the example of " Uncle John," is too often followed now-a-days, for either the en- 

 joyment or the profit of many " retired citizens." If a great many people who determine 

 to retire to country residences, after making their fortunes in codfish and candles, or other 

 honest and praiseworthy vocations, equally distinct from the cultivation of a taste of what 

 truly belongs to an jimerican country place, would first employ some honest man of ca- 

 pacity in such matters, to fit them up a place by contract, it would save many a dollar to 

 their pockets, and a world of groaning over their folly, when they had cooled down from 

 the excitement of over-looking the outlay of their money. The difficulty is, that every 

 man who knows, experimentally, nothing about it, thinks he knows it all, and can get up 

 just as good a place on a bleak side hill, or on a leaching gravelly piece of plain, as anoth- 

 er one has done, who has availed himself of a century of nature's industry, in strewing 

 her trees over a beautiful undulating surface, and only combed her out, and thrown her 

 tortuous twistings into agreeable shape. But I am satisfied there is no help for it. Os- 

 tentation in expenditure has as much to do with the absurdities of getting up country pla- 

 ces, as the desire to provide an agreeable residence. How would their rustic neighbors 

 know they had money, unless they saw them spend it? 



Nine men in every ten, who get up a country place themselves, get tired of, and aban- 

 don it, in less than ten years after it is completed — or more frequently in half the time. 

 The philosophy of country life they never studied when young, or while toiling in the 

 every-day excitement of business, in accumulating their estates; and when they think 

 they want to enjoy retirement, are too old to learn it. A man, to enjoy the country in 

 the decline of life, must know the country when young. He must keep up a constant in- 

 timacy with it all the while. He must love it too, and appreciate its pleasures. If he 

 cannot do this, better to stay in the city, and only pass out now and then, for a jaunt to 

 Saratoga, Newport, or Niagara, and spend the rest of his sunshine in his old haunts of 

 the crowded city, and amid the noisome atmosphere of the docks, the sinuosities of the 

 chambers of Nassau-street, or the nicer moral influence of the board of brokers! 



To guard trees against Hares and Rabbits. — Hares don't grow in this country, and the 

 boys snare all the rabbits; so we have nothing but the mice to trouble us. And they 

 sometimes annoy us exceedingly. Till the bark of young trees gets so thick and rough 

 that the mice will not touch them, I have found no better way than to keep the grounc 

 ploughed, or dug around them, for several feet, and then examine them late in the fall. 



