288 PRACTICAL GAEDEXING. 



boring or digging, to see where, or how, lie is to find material 

 for the roads, and enable bim to determine what features 

 of the ground he will preserve, and what destroy. All those 

 authors who treat of landscape gardening, more or less liken 

 it to the art of the painter, who can bring upon his canvas 

 the beauties of half a dozen different spots, and yet make 

 them all harmonize. But the material difference is in the 

 execution. The painter can represent a mountain, a river, a 

 waterfall, a cascade, trees of five hundred years' growth, and 

 rocks immovable ; but the landscape gardener is limited by 

 want of means, and cannot perform miracles. There is as 

 much difference between the painting and the reality, as 

 between a book of travels and the journey. The painter has 

 no limit : his poetical imagination may run riot in great 

 works. He can bring the Ganges, where only the Thames 

 runs, to water the meadow of Sion House, and the pyramids 

 of Egypt to SaHsbury Plain, as companions to the Druidical 

 remains. If he make his scenery harmonize, and form a good 

 landscape, it is all that is required ; and the landscape gar- 

 dener would do just such wonders on paper. But in practice 

 he must be guided by the scenery he has to begin upon, and 

 the improvements which are practicable. His mountains may 

 require to be erected by cartloads ; and for every hogshead of 

 water that his lake is to contain, he must remove a corre- 

 sponding quantity of solid earth. Loudon recommends the 

 study of landscape in paintings ; but we consider nature will 

 do enough for the gardener. He can form in his mind a 

 tolerably correct idea of what he can imitate, when he look? 

 on the reality ; but if he once allows himself to be beguiled 

 by the pencil of the artist, he may be deceived. 



It is almost impossible to walk: out in the woods and forests 

 of our own country, without learning something practicable. 

 The groupings of trees, the effect of broken ground, the com- 

 manding views from hills, and the rising ground from valleys, 

 — the tui-ns of a river, now gm-gling over a broad bed of rough 

 stones, anon rushing, in a rapid narrow stream, between high 

 banks, and then swelling out into a broad and comparatively 

 smooth lake, — are all so many lessons in the art of landscape 

 gardening. But in nothing do we find more instructive hints 

 than in the various groups of trees, and the wooding of various 

 mounds ; some of which are covered, others only patched, but 

 aU more or less ornamented with foliage and verdure. From 



