ON RURAL EMBELLISHMENT. 259 



knowledge. An esteemed friend, who had become wealthy, 

 and retired from active business, at the middle age of life, 

 had become particularly diseased in body and in mind. 

 We advised him to recreate himself in horticultural pur- 

 suits, as an antidote to both maladies. He replied, that 

 he had no taste, and could not acquire a relish, for these 

 pursuits. We thought otherwise ; and as he was going 

 to spend the summer with a relative, on a farm which 

 belonged to him, we presented him with half a dozen 

 trees, asked him to plant them on his farm, and to report 

 to us in autumn, whether they had afforded him any 

 gratification. When he returned from his summer resi- 

 dence, he confessed, with gratitude, that they had been to 

 him a source of high interest and gratification ; that they 

 had received his constant care and attention ; that he had 

 watched, with a kind of paternal feeling, the developement 

 of the leaves, and the growth of the branches ; that he 

 had examined them almost daily, sedulously guarded them 

 from injury, and watered them with his own hand ; and 

 that these cares and labors afforded pleasure without alloy. 

 Had our regretted friend made this experiment two years 

 earlier, he would, in all probability, be now numbered 

 among the living, and probably among the hale and hearty. 

 But to return to our quotations from Mr. Loudon: — 

 ''One of the greatest of all the sources of enjoyment 

 resulting from the possession of a garden," remarks our 

 author, ''is the endless variety which it produces, either 

 by the perpetual progress of vegetation which is going for- 

 ward in it to maturity, dormancy, or decay, or by the 

 almost innumerable kinds of plants which may be raised 

 in even the smallest garden. Even the same trees, grown 

 in the same garden, are undergoing perpetual changes 

 throughout the year ; and trees change also in every suc- 

 ceeding year, relatively to that which is past ; because 

 they become larger and larger as they advance in age, 

 and acquire more and more their characteristic and mature 

 form." " Independently of the variety of changes result- 

 ing from the variety of plants cultivated, every month 

 throughout the year has its particular operations and its 

 products ; nay, it would not be too much to say, that 



