A CHAPTER ON GARDENERS. 



grounds corresponding in extent. The best talent the country affords is secured for 

 the building — nay, even Europe perhaps is ransacked for a suitable design ; but the 

 garden and grounds — who is to be the architect of these? Alas ! too frequently a 

 person called a gardener, who receives for his services $25 per month, with a shanty 

 to live in, and what few refuse vegetables he can pick up after the family is supplied ; 

 while perhaps the architect of the building is receiving eight or ten times that amount 

 for the same space of time : and what is the result ? Just what ought to be antici- 

 pated — the place in all probability divested of its primitive and natural beauty — fine 

 old trees, which stood just in the proper places, cut down, elevations levelled, and 

 other errors perpetrated ; all which might have been avoided by the exercise of a little 

 good taste and judgment, which might have been purchased for a few more dollars. 



A good gardener, if he aims at landscape gardening, ought to possess the feel- 

 ings of a poet, and the eye and taste of a good landscape painter. Some of my 

 readers may think that I am now going too far. I do not expect a gardener to 

 be a poet or a painter ; but how can a person totally devoid of the above desiderata 

 make a tasteful and judicious disposition of the place — the trees, knolls, dells, 

 glens, shrubs, flowers, <fec., so that they blend, contrast, harmonize, and afford for 

 contemplation the greatest amount of pleasure the place is capable of. How can 

 this, I say, be successfully accomplished by a man of uncultivated mind, who is inca- 

 pable of being impressed by the beautiful in nature and art ? Why I have seen some 

 gardeners pass and repass (without even noticing them) magnificent specimens of trees, 

 &c., while the same objects would have struck others speechless with admiration. 

 There are many gardeners who partake too much of the Wall street mania, viz., too 

 much absorbed in dollars and cents, to the exclusion of much else which is equally 

 valuable and important ; they allow themselves barely enough food to satisfy the 

 demands of nature, and only raiment sufficient to keep them from a state of nudity. 

 Now it is highly commendable in any man, especially a gardener, who is seldom over- 

 paid, to be prudent provident, careful, and even rigidly economical in his expenditures; 

 but when this is allowed to merge into meanness and parsimony, it contracts the soul, 

 and mars and deforms his better nature. Such men can not see beauty or utility in 

 anything unless real profit issues from it in the shape of dollars and cents. A gar- 

 dener of this character can not aftbrd to take a horticultural magazine, attend an 

 exhibition, or go a few miles to see a fellow gardener or a nursery. " Cui bono^'' 

 says he, " it wont pay." I would ask such a one, what pay or profit the naturalist, 

 the botanist — the real lover of plants — expects, when he travels on foot long miles 

 on hot, summer days, to seek his favorites in their native haunts ? Ask one of 

 these devotees, and he will tell you that the smiles of such little gems as Ilepatica, 

 Viola, Claytonia, Saxifraga, &c., after a long and dreary winter, aflbrd hira as much 

 real pleasure as the welcoming of a loved brother, sister, or any other dear friend, 

 after a twelve-month's absence. But the individual who makes the dollar liis idol, is 

 dead to such impressions. 



It may be thought by some of my readers that I have been too severe on th 

 dener, in the foregoing remarks : but it must not be supposed that I class all gar 



