PATRONS OF GARDENING. 



and of Peterhoff were severally the summer resorts 

 of Catherine I. and Elizabeth of Russia, where the 

 one amused herself with building a Chinese village, 

 and the other by cooking her own dinner in the 

 summer-house of Monplaisir. There are more thrill- 

 ing associations connected with the Jardin Anglais 

 of the Trianon at Versailles, where some rose-trees 

 yet grow which were planted by Marie Antoinette ; 

 nor will an Englishman easily forget the grounds of 

 Claremont, which yet cherish the memory and the 

 taste of that truly British princess who delighted to 

 superintend even the arrangement of the flowers in 

 the cottage-garden. At the present moment great 

 things are promised at Windsor, both in the orna- 

 mental and useful department ; and we trust that 

 the alterations now in progress, avowedly under the 

 eye of royalty, will produce gardens as worthy of the 

 sovereign and the nation, as is the palace to which 

 they are attached. 



Little new is to be said upon the history of gar- 

 dening. Horace Walpole and Daines Barrington 

 have well-nigh exhausted the subject, and all later 

 writers go over the same ground. Beginning with 

 the Eden of our first parents, we have the old stories 

 of the orchard of the Hesperides, and the dragon, 

 and the golden fruit (now explained to be oranges) 

 the gardens of Adonis the Happy Isles the 

 hanging terraces of Babylon till, with a passing 

 glance at those of Alcinous and Laertes, as described 

 by Homer, we arrive at the Gardens of Epicurus 

 and the Academe of Plato. Roman history brings 



