8 Hints on Landscape Gardening 



tical experience, the careful study of excellent 

 examples, combined with a passionate love for 

 the subject and the earnest perusal of the best 

 works on the art of gardening in its widest sense, 

 have enabled me, I think, to give some valuable 

 hints and to draw up some useful rules, which 

 will appear to the expert not quite unworthy and 

 which may appear opportune to some dilettante 

 in Nature-painting, if I may so call the creation 

 of a picture, not with colors, but with real woods, 

 hills, meadows, and streams, and which may put 

 it in the category of the arts. For rightly under- 

 stood and judiciously carried out, these sugges- 

 tions may put one in a position, without having 

 to travel the costly and difficult road of experi- 

 ence, to entrust to the park director, engineer, 

 inspector, gardener, or whatever he may be called, 

 merely the technical execution of his own ideas, 

 and thus himself present a work of art, sprung 

 from his own individuality, formed out of his 

 own temperament, instead of having a garden or 

 rather a region made, as one orders a suit of 

 clothes at the tailor's. 



Much will be found, if not familiar, yet per- 

 haps not exactly new, and many an idea may 

 have been better expressed, especially in English 

 works, which, however, are apt to be tediously 

 prolix and to dilute every millionth part of salt 

 with a caskful of water.' 



' When this work was nearly finished, my attention was drawn to 

 a manual on the same theme, recently published in Leipsic. I was pre- 

 pared to suppress my work, but found on perusal of the manual, noth- 

 ing but a laborious compilation of badly digested recipes from English 



