34 THE HISTORY OF GARDENING. 



expedient. Fruits were in the same predicament, and those most in 

 use or that demanded attention, must have entered into and extended 

 the domestic inclosure. The good man Noah, we are told, planted 

 a vineyard, drank of the wine, and was drunken, and every body 

 knows the consequences. Thus we acquired kitchen gardens, 

 orchards, and vineyards. I am apprised that the prototype of all 

 these sorts was the garden of Eden ; but as that Paradise was a good 

 deal larger than any we read of afterwards, being inclosed by the 

 rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates, as every tree that was 

 pleasant to the sight and good fur food grew in it, and as two other 

 trees were likewise found there, of which not a slip or sucker 

 remains, it does not belong to the present discussion. After the Fall, 

 uo man living was suffered to enter into the garden ; and the poverty 

 and necessities of our first ancestors hardly allowed them time to 

 make improvements in their estates in imitation of it, supposing any 

 plan had been preserved. A cottage and a slip of ground for a 

 cabbage and gooseberry bush, such as we see by the side of a 

 common, were in all probability the earliest seats and gardens: a 

 well and bucket succeeded to the Pison and Euphrates. As settle- 

 ments increased, the orchard and the vineyard followed ; and the 

 earliest princes of tribes possessed just the necessaries of a modern 

 farmer. 



Matters, we may well believe, remained long in this situation ; 

 and though the generality of mankind form their ideas from the 

 import of words in their own age, we have no reason to think that for 

 many centuries the term Garden implied more than a kitchen-garden 

 or orchard. When a Frenchman reads of the garden of Eden, I do 

 not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of 

 Versailles, with dipt edges, beraus, and trellis- work. If his devotion 

 humbles him so far as to allow that, considering who designed it, 

 there might be a labyrinth full of ^Esop's Fables, yet he does not 

 conceive, that four of the largest rivers in the world were half so 

 magnificent as an hundred fountains full of statues by Girardon. It 

 is thus that the word Garden has at all times passed for whatever 

 was understood by that term in different countries. But that it 

 meant no more than a kitchen garden or orchard for several centuries, 

 is evident from those few descriptions that are preserved of the most 

 famous gardens of antiquity. 



