THE TASTE FOR PLANTING. 



because the indiscriminate practice subjects them to numerous and troublesome de 

 mands upon both the time and generosity of even the most liberally disposed. But 

 every gentleman who employs a gardener, could well aiFord to allow that gardener to 

 spend a couple of days in a season, in propagating some one or two really valuable 

 trees, shrubs, or plants, that would be a decided acquisition to the gardens of his 

 neighborhood. One or two specimens of such tree or plant, thus raised in abundance, 

 might be distributed freely during the planting season, or during a given week of the 

 same, to all who would engage to plant and take care of the same in their own grounds; 

 and thus this tree or plant would soon become widely distributed about the whole ad- 

 jacent country. Another season, still another desirable tree or plant might be taken in 

 hand, and when ready for home planting, might be scattered broadcast among those who 

 desire to possess it, and so the labor of love might go on as convenience dictated, till 

 the greater part of the gardens, however small, within a considerable circumference, 

 would contain at least several of the most valuable, useful, and ornamental trees and 

 shrubs for the climate. 



The second means is, by what the nurserymen may do. 



We are very well aware that the first thought which will cross the minds of a selfish 

 and narrow minded nurseryman, (if any such read the foregoing paragraph,) is that 

 such a course of gratutious distribution of good plants, on the part of private persons, 

 will speedily ruin his business. But he was never more greatly mistaken, as both 

 observation and reason will convince him. Who are the nurseryman's best customers? 

 That class of men who have long owned a garden, whether it be half a rood or many 

 acres, who have never planted trees — or, if any, have but those not worth planting? 

 Not at all. His best customers are those who have formed a taste for trees by plant- 

 ing them, and who, having got a taste for improving, are seldom idle in the matter, and 

 keep pretty regular accounts with the dealers in trees. If you cannot get a person 

 who thinks he has but little time or taste for improving his place to buy trees, and he 

 will accept a plant, or a fruit tree, or a sh^de tree, now and then, from a neighbor 

 whom he knows to be " curious in such things" — by all means, we say to the nursery- 

 man, encourage him to plant at any rate and all rates. 



If that man's tree turns out to his satisfaction, he is an amateur, one only begin- 

 ning to pick the shell, to be sure — but an amateur full fledged by-and-bye. If he 

 once gets a taste for gardening downright — if the flavor of his own Rareripes touch his 

 palate but once, as something quite different from what he has always, like a contented, 

 ignorant donkey, bought in the market — if his Malmaison rose, radiant with the senti- 

 ment of the best of French women, and the loveliness of intrinsic bud-beauty once 

 touches his hitherto dull eyes, so that the scales of his blindness to the fact that one rose 

 " difl"ers from another," fall ofi" forever — then we say thereafter, he is one of the nurse- 

 ryman's best customers. Begging is both too slow and too dependent a position for 

 him, and his garden soon fills up by ransacking the nurserymen's catalogues, and it 

 is more likely to be swamped by the myriad of things which he would think very 

 much alike, (if he had not bought them by different appellations,) than by any 

 ty spaces waiting for the liberality of more enterprising cultivators 



