GLEANINGS ON GARDENS. 19 



A garden at Hillingdon, near Uxbridge, must have 

 been a noted one, belonging to a * most curious and 

 learned gentleman in the art of gardening, Samuel 

 Richardson, Esq./ whom Bradley so frequently men- 

 tions in his New Improvements ; and in the church- 

 yard of which village he mentions the noted Yew-trees 

 there, after saying that the leaves of the Yew are so 

 small that it is possible to bring them to any form we 

 desire, as men, beasts, birds, ships, and the like, and in 

 which churchyard (by-the-bye) poor Dr. Dodd (whose 

 fate once made so much noise) and his wife are both 

 buried, and 'after life's fretful fever, sleep well. 1 * 



Bradley, in the above volume, notices no less than 



* 'To give new beauties to your garden,' says the Rev. J. 

 Lawrence, in his Clergyman's Recreation, ' none in ray mind is to 

 be compared to the yew, which is so tonsile, and grows so very thick 

 and beautiful with clipping, and withal bids defiance to the hardest 

 winters, that it is the best and most lasting ornament in a garden. 

 To make one in love with these hedges, you need only take a walk 

 in the Physic Gardens at Oxford, where you are presented with all 

 that art and nature can do, to make the things most agreeable to 

 the eye.' 



Cobbett, when relating many particulars of the Yew in his 

 Woodlands (for his pen has an original power in describing these 

 subjects, he himself telling us, that his 'heart and mind is wrapped 

 up in everything belonging to the gardens, the fields, and the 

 woods '), observes that ' It resists all weather, stands uninjured on 

 the bleakest hills, where even the scrubbiest of thorns and under- 

 wood will hardly live. Big as the head of this tree generally is, in 

 proportion to its trunk, most heavily laden as it constantly is with 

 leaf, forming as it does such a hold for the wind, neither head nor 

 trunk ever flinches, though in situations where it would be impossible 



