On Improvement in Horticulture. 421 



beginning of the sixteenth century, that gardening attracted much 

 attention in England. Previous to this time, cabbages, and even 

 pot-herbs, imported from Holland, constituted luxuries, found on- 

 ly on the tables of the cpulent. During this reign, apricots, mel- 

 ons, herbs and esculent roots, were first introduced into the roy- 

 al gardens. Among the nc.v plants of that day is mentioned "ihe 

 lilacke trees, v/hich bear no fruite, but only a pleasant fiowere." 

 Improvement in horticulture was greatly extended under EHza- 

 beth and Charles the first. During the reign of the latter, the 

 first work upon English gardening was published by Parkinson, 

 under the title of "A garden of all sorts of pleasante fioweres, 

 with a kitchen garden, of all manner of herbs and roots, and an 

 orchard of all sorts of fruit-bearing trees," which is yet quoted 

 with high commendation. 



About the middle of the seventeenth century, several valuable 

 publications upon horticulture appeared in England and France; 

 and in 1734 Phillip Miller published his celebrated Gardners' 

 Dictionary, an original work of merit, which attracted general 

 notice, and gave a new impulse to improvement. British and oth- 

 er foreign works upon gardening have been greatly multiplied; and 

 improvement has kept pace with the increase of wealth and refine- 

 ment, until horticulture has attained to a high state of perfection, 

 as a science as well as an art, in most of the civilized countries of 

 Europe. No gentleman of opulence or taste there, deems him- 

 self fitted to enjoy the comforts and luxuries of life, without his 

 garden. Horticultural societies have been every where establish- 

 ed, — princes have been competitors in them for honorary rewards; 

 useful and ornamental plants have been sedulously collected from 

 every quarter of the globe, and innumerable new varieties have 

 been added to the catalogue by the skill and industry of man. 

 Within a kw years, the splendid Encyclopedia of Gardening 

 has been added to our horticultural works by the indefatigable 

 Loudon, professing to give all that is interesting in the history, 

 and all that is useful in the science, or in the practice, of garden- 

 ing. The society of London established a garden in 18 J 8, and 

 sent agents into every quarter of the v^orld, to collect whatever 

 could be found useful or ornamental. One of these agents, after 

 traversing the United States and the Canadas, spent four years 

 on the Pacific coast of our continent, exploring the coast from 

 California to the mouth of the Columbia, and thence across the 

 coiuinent to the Hudson Bay Factories, in collecting rare plants 

 and seeds. Li a subsequent voyage to the western border of our 

 continent, this indefatigable agent was destroyed by a wild bull, 

 upon one of the Pacific Islands. Yet the name of Douglass will 

 be perpetuated in the cognomen of several new plants which he 

 first brought into notice. Some idea may be formed of the ex- 

 tent of this society's labors and usefulness from the facts, that in 



