62 Landscape Gardening 



lion. He desires to encourage a certain wildness of growth, 

 and allows his trees to spring up occasionally in thickets to 

 assist this effect; he delights in occasional irregularity of 

 stem and outline, and he therefore suffers his trees here and 

 there to crowd each other; he admires a twisted limb or a 

 moss covered branch, and in pruning he therefore is careful 

 to leave precisely what it would be the aim of the other to 

 remove; and his pruning, where it is at all necessary, is 

 directed rather towards increasing the naturally striking 

 and peculiar habit of the picturesque tree, than assisting it 

 in developing a form of unusual refinement and symmetry. 

 From these remarks we think the amateur will easily divine 

 that planting, grouping, and culture to produce the Beauti- 

 ful, require a much less artistic eye (though much more care 

 and attention) than performing the same operations to elicit 

 the Picturesque. The charm of a refined and polished 

 landscape garden, as we usually see it in the Beautiful 

 grounds with all the richness and beauty developed by 

 high culture, arises from our admiration of the highest per- 

 fection, the greatest beauty 'of form, to which every object 

 can be brought; and, in trees, a judicious selection, with 

 high cultivation, will always produce this effect. 



But in the Picturesque landscape garden there is visible 

 a piquancy of effect, certain bold and striking growths and 

 combinations, which we feel at once, if we know them to be 

 the result of art, to be the production of a peculiar species 

 of attention - - not merely good, or even refined ornamental 

 gardening. In short, no one can be a picturesque improver 

 (if he has to begin with young plantations) who is not him- 

 self something of an artist - - who has not studied nature 

 with an artistical eye - - and who is not capable of imitat- 

 ing, eliciting, or heightening, in his plantations or other 

 portions of his residence, the picturesque in its many varia- 

 tions. And we may add here, that efficient and charming as 

 is the assistance which all ornamental planters will derive 

 from the study of the best landscape engravings and pic- 

 tures of distinguished artists, they are indispensably neces- 

 sary to the Picturesque improver. In these he will often 



