THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



lias made the moral and intellectual wilderness in 

 which he is cast bloom for him in his trees, and 

 herbs, and flowers ; and if unable, from the narrow- 

 ness of his means and situation, 



" To raise the ten-ace or to sink the grot," 



has found his body refreshed and his spirits lightened, 

 in growing the salad to give a relish to his simple 

 meal, and the flower to bedeck his threadbare but- 

 ton-hole, enabled by these recreations to bear up 

 against those little every-day annoyances which, 

 though hardly important enough to tax our faith or 

 our philosophy, make up, in an ill-regulated or un- 

 employed mind, the chief ills of life. 



Pope, who professed that of all his works he was 

 most proud of his garden, said also, with more nature 

 and truth, that he " pitied that man who had com- 

 pleted everything in his garden." To pull down 

 and destroy is quite as natural to man as to build up 

 and improve, and this love of alteration may help to 

 account for the many changes of style in gardening 

 that have taken place. The course of the seasons, 

 the introduction of new flowers, the growth of trees, 

 will always of themselves give the gardener enough 

 to do ; and if the flower-garden is perfect, and there 

 is a nook of spare ground at hand, instead of extend- 

 ing his parterres, which to be neat must needs be 

 circumscribed, he had better devote it to an arbore- 

 tum for choice trees and shrubs ; or take up with 

 some one extensive class as for a thornery or a 

 pinery ; or make it a wilderness-like mixture of all 



