THE NEGLECTED AMERICAN PLANTS. 



them, but considered them " wild plants," and therefore, too little deserving of atten- 

 tion to be worth the trouble of collecting, even for curious foreigners. " And so,'' he 

 continued, in a country of Azaleas, Kalmias, Rhododendrons, Cypripediums, Magnoli- 

 as and Nysas, — the loveliest flowers, shrubs, and trees of temperate climates, — you never 

 put them in your gardens, but send over the water every year for thousands of dollars 

 worth of English larches and Dutch hyacinths. Voila h gout RepubliqueV 



In truth, we felt that we quite deserved the sweeping sarcasm of our Belgian 

 friend. We had always, indeed, excused ourselves for the well known neglect of the 

 riches of our native Flora, by saying that what we can see any day in the woods, is 

 not the thing by which to make a garden distinguished — and that since all mankind 

 have a passion for novelty, where, as in a fine foreign tree or shrub, both beauty and 

 novelty are combined, so much the greater is the pleasure experienced. But, indeed, 

 one has only to go to England, where " American plants" are the fashion, (not unde- 

 servedly, too,) to learn that he knows very little about the beauty of American plants. 

 The difference between a grand Oak or Magnolia, or Tulip tree, grown with all its 

 graceful and majestic development of head, in a park where it has nothing to interfere 

 with its expansion but sky and air, and the same tree shut up in a forest, a quarter of a 

 mile high, with only a tall gigantic mast of a stem, and a tuft of foliage at the top, is 

 the difi'erence between the best bred and highly cultivated man of the day, and the 

 best buff"alo hunter of the Rocky Mountains, with his sinewy body tattooed and tan- 

 ned till you scarcely know what is the natural color of the skin. A person accustom- 

 ed to the wild Indian only, might think he knew perfectly well what a man is — and so 

 indeed, he does, if you mean a red man. But the " civilizee" is not more diff"erent from 

 the aboriginal man of the forest, than the cultivated and perfect garden tree or shrub, 

 (granting always that it takes to civilization — which some trees, like Indians, do not,) 

 than a tree of the pleasure grounds differs from a tree of the woods. 



Perhaps the finest revelation of this sort in England, is the clumps and masses of 

 our Mountain Laurel, Kalmia latifolia, and our Azaleas and Rhododendrons, which 

 embellish the English pleasure-grounds. In some of the great country seats, whole 

 acres of lawn, kept like velvet, are made the ground-work upon which these masses of 

 the richest foliaged and the gayest flowering shrubs are embroidered. Each mass is plan- 

 ted in a round or oval bed of deep, rich, sandy mould, in which it attains a luxuriance 

 and perfection of form and foliage, almost as new to an American as to a Sandwich 

 Islander. The Germans make avenues of our Tulip trees, and in the South of France, 

 one finds more planted Magnolias in the gardens, than there are, out of the woods, in 

 all the United States. It is thus, by seeing them away from home, where their merits 

 are better appreciated, and more highly developed, that one learns for the first time 

 what our gardens have lost, by our having none of these " American plants" in them. 



The subject is one which should be pursued to much greater length than we are able to 

 follow it in the present article. Our woods and swamps are full of the most exquisite 

 plants, some of which would greatly embellish even the smallest garden. But it is 

 rather to one single feature in the pleasure grounds, that we would at this moment di- 

 rect the attention, and that is, the introduction of two broad-leaved evergreen shrubs, 



