BOOK I. GARDENING IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL. 68 



Warsaw garden, of which a catalogue was published towards the middle of the last cen- 

 tury, we could, in 1813, procure no account. Count Benningsen had an excellent 

 botanic garden at his seat near Wilna, which, as already observed, was destroyed and the 

 chateau burned down in 1812. It was rich in hardy plants. At Pulhawa the Princess 

 Isabella Czartoryska has a considerable collection, and used frequently to send her 

 gardener (Savage), lately deceased, to England to procure the newest exotics. 



285. A few flowers are cultivated in some of the wealthier citizens' gardens, around War- 

 saw, and a few in gardens of the conventual institutions ; but in a general point of view, 

 they are as uncommon in Poland as in Russia. In both countries a few may occasionally 

 be seen on market-days, which have been gathered in the fields, and brought in by the 

 peasants ; these are purchased by the minor nobles to decorate their rooms, by the monks 

 to display on their altars, or by devotees to present to the virgin or the image of their 

 patron saint. The floors of the higher classes, in Poland, are often strewed with the 

 leaves of the Acorus calamus, which abounds in the marshes of that country. In some 

 districts, towards Courland, the spray of the spruce fir is used for this purpose ; a practice, 

 as Mary Woolstonecraft has remarked, common in Sweden and Norway. 



286. The horticulture of Poland is at a very low ebb : excepting in a few of the noble- 

 men's gardens and those of the richest monasteries, there was till lately no vegetable but the 

 kohl rabi, and no fruit but the apple, pear, and cherry. Towards the sea-coast, and on 

 the borders of Austria, there is greater variety. The potatoe is now in more general use 

 in Poland than in Russia, though a slight prejudice still exists against it, from its having 

 been introduced by the Germans. The cucumber is cultivated in many places for salting, 

 or preserving by barrelling and sinking the barrel in their wells. In some places, the 

 common carnation poppy is grown for the seed, which taken when beginning to ripen, 

 and strewed on a sort of milk-porridge, or milk-paste, made from the meal of buck-wheat, 

 or Polish millet (Dactylon sanguinale), is reckoned a delicacy. Bees are kept by some of 

 the freed men or minor nobles. The Polish hives and mode of taking the honey, to be 

 afterwards described, are exceedingly simple, and never requiring the death of the insects, 

 seem preferable to any mode of bee-culture yet devised by the bee-masters of other coun- 

 tries. Hirschfield mentions, that the gardens of Prince Casimir Poniatowski, elder 

 brother of the last king, contained at one time 5000 annanas, in a range of hot-houses 600 

 feet long. In 1813, the only pines grown in Poland, were a few at Pulhawa, and some 

 grown by a German, who rented the hot-houses belonging to the late king's establishment 

 at Warsaw. Only one or two instances then existed of vines and peaches being grown 

 near the capital, but there were abundance of these and other fruits at Pulhawa and 

 Zamoyst, and some few at Villaneuve. The Polish noblemen have gained in every kind of 

 knowledge from having been so long a period in the French service ; and since the re- 

 establishment of peace, they have set about agricultural and gardening improvements, 

 with a considerable degree of energy. 



287. Planting in Poland is but little required for purposes of utility. Some public 

 avenues have been formed near Warsaw and Posen ; and the elm, one of the best avenue 

 trees, thrives at both places. There are scarcely any hedges in the country, excepting in 

 gardens and near towns. 



288. Original Polish authors on gardening are not to be expected : but translations of 

 various works on rural economy were pointed out to us in the library of the Dominicans, 

 at Grodno ; but the only Polish work on gardening, which may be considered as original, 

 we believe to be Mysli Rozne o Sposobie Zakladania Ogrodow, &c. 1808 ; or, " Various 

 Thoughts on the Manner of planting Gardens," by Princess Isabella Czartoryska. 



SECT. IX. Of the Rise, Progress, and present State of Gardening in Spain and 



Portugal. 



289. The love of gardens, or of rural life, it is alleged by Hirschfield, is far from being 

 general in Spain : not however from lightness of character or bad taste, but from a kind 

 of supineness which cannot be better described than by calling it Spanish. This supine- 

 ness is the more incomprehensible, as the country, though desert and uncultivated in 

 many places, is yet full of natural charms in others, thus indicating as it were a field of 

 exertions for the hand of man. In many provinces, Puente informs us, one may travel 

 several leagues without seeing a tree, and according to the same author, the environs of 

 Madrid neither present pavilions nor country-houses, and it was not till towards the end 

 of the eighteenth century that they began to repair the roads around the capital, and 

 border them with trees. 



290. The Arabs of Spain attended to agriculture, translated and commented on the 

 ancient authors, and though they occupied themselves more particularly in the study of 

 medicine and botany, they did not neglect the culture of gardens. Many of them 

 travelled to their brethren in Asia, to pursue natural history, and bring plants to Europe. 

 Ebn-Alwan has left us a list of plants in the garden of Seville, in the eleventh century, 



