134 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



Pray why don't MD go to 'Trim, and see Laracor, and give 

 me an account of the garden, and the river, and the holly 

 and the cherry-trees on the river-walk. — Journal to Stella. 



JOSEPH C IR, — Having lately read your essay on The Pleasures of the 

 ADDISON <J Imagination, I was so taken with your thoughts upon 



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some of our English gardens, that I cannot forbear troubling 

 you with a letter upon that subject. I am one, you must know, 

 who am looked upon as a humourist in gardening. I have 

 several acres about my house, which I call my garden, and 

 which a skilful gardener would not know what to call. It is 

 a confusion of kitchen and parterre, orchard and flower-garden, 

 which lie so mixt and interwoven with one another, that if a 

 foreigner, who had seen nothing of our country, should be 

 conveyed into my garden at his first landing, he would look 

 upon it as a natural wilderness, and one of the uncultivated 

 parts of our country. My flowers grow up in several parts 

 of the garden in the greatest luxuriancy and profusion. I am 

 so far from being fond of any particular one, by reason 

 of its rarity, that if I meet with any one in a field 

 which pleases me, I give it a place in my garden. By 

 this means, when a stranger walks with me, he is surprised to see 

 several large spots of ground covered with ten thousand different 

 colours, and has often singled out flowers he might have met with 

 under a common hedge, in a field, or in a meadow, as some of the 

 greatest beauties of the place. The only method I observe in this 

 particular, is to range in the same quarter the products of the same 

 season, that they may make their appearance together, and com- 

 pose a picture of the greatest variety. There is the same irregularity 

 in my plantations, which run into as great a wilderness as their 

 natures will permit. I take in none that do not naturally rejoice 

 in the soil; and am pleased, when I am walking in a labyrinth 

 of my own raising, not to know whether the next tree I shall meet 

 with is an apple or an oak ; an elm or a pear tree. My kitchen 

 has likewise its particular quarters assigned it; for besides the 



