218 THE MAGAZINE OF HORTICULTURE. 



beiias, portiilaccas and calceolarias outshone all the native 

 summer beauties of the landscape. 



Surrounding the field that adjoined the cottage was an old 

 stone wall, gray with lichens and covered with numerous 

 wild wines that had clustered round it, as the ivy entwines 

 itself round the walls of ruined castles and abbeys in the old 

 world. The clematis overshadowed it with flowers and 

 foliage in summer, and with its beautiful silken down in the 

 fall of the year ; and the celastrus grew with it side by side, 

 offering its honied flowers to the bee, and its scarlet, bitter- 

 sweet berries to the hand of the simpler, or to the famishing 

 winter birds. Among this vinery the summer warblers built 

 their nests ; and numbers of them were revealed to sight, 

 when the foliage was swept away by the late autumnal 

 winds. 



The ladies of the mansion would not readily consent to 

 the removal of this old stone wall, with its various rustic 

 appurtenances, which seemed to them a part of the original 

 charms of the place ; but they were soon convinced that the 

 villa ought not to stand in the midst of such shabby " sur- 

 roundings." They were plied with arguments drawn from 

 the works of men who had studied nature in the galleries of 

 art, and through the medium of canvas, and were persuaded 

 to believe that the principles of English landscape gardening 

 must never be sacrificed to the crude notions of a poetic 

 mind. The ladies gave up their impulses in favor of the 

 cold rules of professional taste. The stone wall was remov- 

 ed : the wild rose and the eglantine were destroyed ; the 

 flowering shrubs that formed, on each side of it, a glistening 

 row of bloom and verdure, were rooted up ; a neat paling 

 fence was erected as a temporary boundary, and a hedge of 

 buckthorn was planted all around the old pasture. 



The lawn in front of the mansion was enclosed by an 

 ornamental fence,, and the narrow foot-path that led up to the 

 rude door-step of the cottage, meeting in its course an occa- 

 sional tuft of spiraea and low laurel, gave place to a neatly 

 gravelled walk, four feet six inches wide, and shaped into a 

 graceful serpentine curve.. The enclosure was filled with 



