Feminine Taste in Rural Affairs 287 



Almost all the really enthusiastic and energetic lady gar- 

 deners that we have the pleasure of knowing, belong to the 

 wealthiest class in this country. We have a neighbor on 

 the Hudson, for instance, whose pleasure grounds cover 

 many acres, whose flower garden is a miracle of beauty, and 

 who keeps six gardeners at work all the season. But there 

 is never a tree transplanted that she does not see its roots 

 carefully handled; not a walk laid out that she does not 

 mark its curves; not a parterre arranged that she does not 

 direct its colors and grouping, and even assist in planting it. 

 No matter what guests enjoy her hospitality, several hours 

 every day are thus spent in out-of-door employment; and 

 from the zeal and enthusiasm with which she always talks 

 of everything relating to her country life, we do not doubt 

 that she is far more rationally happy now, than when she 

 received the homage of a circle of admirers at one of the 

 most brilliant of foreign courts. 



On the table before us, lies a letter from a lady of fortune 

 in Philadelphia, whose sincere and hearty enthusiasm in 

 country life always delights us. She is one of those beings 

 who animate everything she touches, and would make a 

 heart beat in a granite rock, if it had not the stubbornness 

 of all "facts before the flood." She is in a dilemma now 

 about the precise uses of lime (which has staggered many 

 an old cultivator, by the way), and tells the story of her 

 doubts with an earnest directness and eloquence that one 

 seeks for in vain in the essays of our male chemico-horti- 

 cultural correspondents. We are quite sure that there will 

 be a meaning in every fruit and flower which this lady plucks 

 from the garden, of which our fair friends, who are the dis- 

 ciples of the Sevigne school, have not the feeblest con- 

 ception. 



There are, also, we fear, those who fancy that there is 

 something rustic, unfeminine and unrefined, about an interest 

 in country out-of-door matters. Would we could present 

 to them a picture which rises in our memory, at this mo- 

 ment, as the finest of all possible denials to such a theory. 

 In the midst of the richest agricultural region of the northern 



