GENERAL REMARKS. 429 



ily ensue. A willow drooping over a rustic bridge, and 

 a pine waving its giant limbs on a rocky eminence, are 

 each charming in their place, because in harmony with 

 surrounding nature ; but pines and willows alternating 

 around a house, or on a flat approach road, are most 

 discordant and in the vilest taste, arid yet we constantly 

 meet with discrepancies in new country places, not a 

 whit less barbarous. 



A common error, and we think a very decided one, in 

 our new places, is the anxiety to have flowers and 

 flowering shrubs while the place is still in the rough, 

 and before we know where to put them with propriety. 



A very usual employment of new grounds immediately 

 adjacent to the house, is the most injudicious and taste- 

 less admixture of decapitated forest trees and dahlias, 

 with vases, evergreens, roses, altheas, and the various 

 common plants, indiscriminately put together, a few 

 inches, or at most a few feet apart, in the coarse weedy 

 grass, which is the best apology for lawn which could 

 be got up in the time exposed to the carelessness of 

 workmen, and the depredation of roadside cattle. We 

 have even seen avenues and in places too, where 

 otherwise there are evidences of good taste planted 

 wtih alternate rows of forest trees and dahlias, with an 

 occasional rose tree or geranium. Nothing, we con- 

 ceive, can be in worse taste than this ; for though 

 nothing can well be prettier than a rose in a rose gar- 

 den properly surrounded by the most refined and orna- 

 mental shrubs, like a jewel in an appropriate setting, 

 yet can anything be more improper or discordant than 

 the same rose in a stubble field, or what is quite as in- 

 appropriate, in the rough and ill-kept grounds of a raw 

 and unfinished place. Eefinernent must be associated 

 with and surrounded by refinement, or it loses half its 

 charm. We hear of and sometimes see .a rough dia- 

 mond ; but no one, we think, will pretend to say that 



