HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GARDENING. » 



enthusiasm, "Go thither, meditate over the inscriptions dictated hj 

 taste, meditate there with the wise, sigh -with, the lover, and bless 

 Watelet." 



17. Dm-ing the present century, this question, which at its commence- 

 ment was one of chaos, has acquired form and consistency. The 

 distinction which Sir U. Price, Whately, and a host of writers sought to 

 estabUsh and simplify, has been ably continued by Sir Walter Scott, Sir 

 Henry Stewart, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder — the able editor of the last 

 edition of Price's work, — Gilpin, and a host of MTi'iters, ably seconded by 

 Eepton, and another Gilpin — a professional landscape gardener, — Sir 

 Joseph Paxton, and other well-known practical gardeners ; and it is now 

 universally admitted that the garden surrounding the house, whether 

 an architectural terrace or bedded lawn, must of necessity possess 

 uniformity ; that the shrubbery immediately adjoining must partake of 

 the same character, somewhat modified ; while the more distant portions 

 and the park are willingly abandoned to the landscape gardener — a 

 term, however, to which Sir Walter Scott takes exception. 



18. Such is a very brief sketch of Palatial Gardening, which is 

 necessarily the parent of all other styles worthy of name. The extent, 

 however, to which the humbler class of gardens have been carried bears 

 testimony how deeply rooted is the taste for flowers and gardening 

 pursuits. While the higher order of gardening was settling down into 

 the refined taste wliich has produced the ornamental gardens of Chats- 

 worth, Trentham, Alton Towers, and Dalkeith Palace, suburban gardening 

 was also undergoing its own transition. The undoubted taste of Kent, 

 Brown, and Repton was some protection to the places of which they 

 had the immediate charge ; but the humbler gardens, brought into form 

 by their ignorant and careless imitators, had no such protection : with 

 them a taste for the fantastic occupied the place which in a previous 

 age had been devoted to the formal ; beds of bizarre forms and irregular 

 outline — lady's tresses en pa;pillotes, as they have been called — disfigured 

 many a la'wn, where — 



" Up and down, carved like an apple tart, 

 Here snip, and trip, and cut, and slish and slash, 

 Like to a censor in a barber's shop." 



This style of arrangement, though still occasionally seen, has given place, 

 like the same evil in more important places, to a purer and more simple 

 fityle of arranging garden grounds. The kitchen garden is now no 

 longer looked upon as a place forbidden, even to the females of the 

 family, and the beautifully-arranged kitchen gardens at Frogmore, 



