22 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



been interspersed with occasional thickets, and varied with 

 fountanis, prospect towers, and aviaries for singing birds. 



The Athenians borrowed their taste in gardens from 

 Persia. The lime tree and the box lined their walks, and 

 bore patiently the shears of symmetry ; and a passion for 

 fragrant flowers seems to have been greatly indulged 

 by them. Their most celebrated philosophers made the 

 sylvan, or landscape gardens of their time, their favorite 

 schools. And the gardens of Epicurus and Plato appear 

 to have been symmetrical groves of the olive, plane, and 

 elm, enriched by elegant statues, monuments, and temples, 

 the beauty of which, for their peculiar purpose, has never 

 been surpassed by any example of more modern times. 

 Among the Romans, ornamental gardening seems to have 

 been not a little studied. The villas of the Emperors Nero 

 and Adrian were enriched with everything magnificent 

 and pleasing in their grounds ; and the classically famous 

 villas of Cicero at Arpinum, and of Pliny at Tusculum, 

 with Caesar's 



" Private arbors, and new planted orchards. 

 On this side Tiber," 



are among the most celebrated specimens of the taste, 

 among the ancients. Phny's garden, of which a pretty 

 minute account remains, — filled with cypresses and bay 

 trees, planted to form a coursing place or hippodrome, 

 adorned with vis-a-vis figures of animals cut in box trees, 

 and decorated with fountains and marble alcoves, shaded 

 by vines — seems, indeed, to have been the true classical 

 type of all the later efforts of modern continental nations 

 in their geometric gardens. 

 Of the latter, the Italians have been most successful in 



