Historical Sketches .'> 



Most of its beauty, and all its charms, may, however, be 

 enjoyed in ten or twenty acres, fortunately situated, and 

 well treated; and Landscape Gardening, in America, com- 

 bined and working in harmony as it is with our fine scenery, 

 is already beginning to give us results scarcely less beau- 

 tiful than those produced by its finest efforts abroad. The 

 lovely villa residences of our noble river and lake margins, 

 when well treated - - even in a few acres of tasteful fore- 

 ground, -- seem so entirely to appropriate the whole adja- 

 cent landscape, and to mingle so sweetly in their outlines 

 with the woods, the valleys, and shores around them, that 

 the effects are often truly enchanting. 



But if Landscape Gardening, in its proper sense, cannot 

 be applied to the embellishment of the smallest cottage 

 residences in the country, its principles may be studied 

 with advantage, even by him who has only three trees to 

 plant for ornament; and we hope no one \vill think his 

 grounds too small, to feel willing to add something to the 

 general amount of beauty in the country. If the possessor 

 of the cottage acre would embellish in accordance with 

 propriety, he must not, as we have sometimes seen, render 

 the whole ridiculous by aiming at ambitious and costly em- 

 bellishments; but he will rather seek to delight us by the 

 good taste evinced in the tasteful simplicity of the whole 

 arrangement. And if the proprietors of our country villas, 

 in their improvements, are more likely to run into any one 

 error than another, we fear it will be that of too great a 

 desire for display - - too many vases, temples, and seats, - 

 and too little purity and simplicity of general effect. 



The inquiring reader will perhaps be glad to have a 

 glance at the history and progress of the art of tasteful 

 gardening; a recurrence to which, as w^ell as to the history 

 of the fine arts, will afford abundant proof that, in the first 

 stage or infancy of all these arts, while the perception of 

 their ultimate capabilities is yet crude and imperfect, man- 

 kind has, in every instance, been completely satisfied with 

 the mere exhibition of design or art. Thus in sculpture the 

 first statues were only attempts to imitate rudely the form 



