312 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



time has given it the benefit of its softening touches, if it 

 has been thus properly executed, will not be much inferior 

 to those matchless bits of fine landscape. A more striking 

 and artistical effect will be produced by substituting for 

 native trees and shrubs, common on the banks of streams 

 and lakes in the country, only Y^YQ foreign shrubs, vines, 

 and aquatic plants of hardy growth, suitable for such 

 situations. While these are arranged in the same manner 

 as the former, from their comparative novelty, especially 

 in such sites, they will at once convey the idea of refined 

 and elegant art. 



If any person will take the trouble to compare a piece of 

 water so formed, when complete, with the square or circular 

 sheets or ponds now in vogue among us, he must indeed be 

 little gifted with an appreciation of the beautiful, if he do 

 not at once perceive the surpassing merit of the natural 

 style. In the old method, the banks, level, or rising on all 

 sides, without any or but few surrounding trees, carefully 

 gravelled along the edge of the water, or what is still worse, 

 walled up, slope away in a tame, dull, uninteresting grass 

 field. In the natural method, the outline is varied, some- 

 times receding from the eye, at others stealing out, and 

 inviting the gaze the banks here slope off gently with a 

 gravelly beach, and there rise abruptly in different heights, 

 abounding with hollows, projections, and eminences, show- 

 ing various colored locks and soils, intermingled with a 

 luxuriant vegetation of all sizes and forms, corresponding to 

 the different situations. Instead of allowing the sun to 

 pour down in one blaze of light, without any objects to 

 soften it with their shade, the thick overhanging groups and 

 masses of trees cast, here and there, deep cool shadows. 

 Stealing through the leaves and branches, the sun-beams 



