242 The Picturesque in Floriculture. 



exactly adapted to its peculiar plant? What lover of ferns would 

 not strive to imitate the method of growing such delicate maiden 

 hair, such slender and Hexile showy stemmed ./isplenium, or its 

 co-species, with purplish stripe and smaller leaflets, seen just at 

 the bottom of that cleft, or the fragile and light Nephrodium, or 

 the rooting-fronded walking fern, whose lanceolate leaf will meas- 

 ure the goodly length of twelve honest and lawful inches? Such 

 Chelone, and Lobelia, Eupatoriwm, and a host of inhabitants of 

 running streams or plashy water-courses! Such tufts of slender, 

 nodding, cerulean tinted hare-bells, whose linear and lance-shaped 

 foliage investing their flower-stems, sorely puzzles the young 

 botanist in quest of the meaning of the epithet round- leafed, so 

 cunningly has our little flower concealed from passing remark its 

 tiny and almost orbicular, radical appendages! Verily, the ef- 

 forts of the garden sink into almost insignificance, compared with 

 the unrestrained, untutored luxuriance of nature! Our clumps 

 of trees, by "fives and sevens," to denote by irregularity an ap- 

 proach to nature, are sorry imitations of yonder masses of rich 

 forest growth. Produce by art such a family group as these 

 thirteen straight and perfectly united lindens, so curiously though 

 slightly radiating from a common centre, each a sister stem of 

 nearly equal growth and years! Or show me, from your nursery 

 bed, an azalea of such vivid rose, and with such innumerable 

 flowers; or, by application of knife and ligature, by incision and 

 distortion of branches, exhibit an equal and a rival to that crook- 

 ed and fantastic broad-leaved laurel, whose foliage, amid sun and 

 shower, winter and summer, is so glossy green, and whose peri- 

 odical inflorescence is so magnificent! Or where the rhododen- 

 dron of Nepaul, with its glorious varieties of hybrid parentage, 

 so pre-eminent in stature, so rich in foliage, and so delicate in 

 flower as yonder tall and ancient individual, whose summit and 

 base exhibit its pyramidal heads of light rosy blossoms, the pride 

 of the American northern swamps? 



After passing objects of interest and beauty in our ramble 

 just now mentioned, our attention was agreeably directed to a 

 curious natural rock-work, for such we may call an irregular and 

 large stone of ten or more feet high, covered with profuse vege- 

 tation. The corroding tooth of time and the presence of oxide 

 of iron had decomposed portions, presenting several and singular 

 shades and forms. Where there was an absence of soil, minute 

 lichens and pretty mosses had taken possession. Such were the 

 elegant i?ryum roseum, and the more common Anictangium, 

 Parmelia tartarea and Endocarpon(?) sp. Then of the more 

 familiar plants was a succession of vernal and autumnal. We 

 noticed the fimbriated Mitella, Aquilegia canadensis, e'^^rum tri- 

 phyllum, Convallaria racemosa; Corydalis cucullata, J-^iola pu- 

 bescens; Convallaria biflora, Aralia nudicaulis, Cerastium vul- 



