84 HORTICULTURE. 



eighteen years, with the employment of gardeners, as almost any 

 person in America, and we never remember an instance of an Ame- 

 rican offering himself as a professional gardener. Our own rural 

 workmen confine themselves wholly to the farm, knowing nothing, 

 or next to nothing, of the more refined and careful operations of the 

 garden. We may, therefore, thank foreigners for nearly all the 

 gardening skill that we have in the country, and we are by no 

 means inclined to underrate the value of their labors. Among them 

 there are, as we well know, many most excellent men, who deserve 

 the highest commendation for skill, taste, and adaptation though, 

 on the other hand, there are a great many who have been gar- 

 deners (if we may trust their word for it), to the Duke of , 



and the Marquis of , but who would make us pity his grace or 



his lordship, if we could believe he ever depended on Paddy for 

 any other exotics than potatoes and cabbages. 



But taking it for granted that our gardeners are wholly foreign- 

 ers, and mostly British, they all have the disadvantage of coming 

 to us, even the best educated of them, with their practice wholly 

 founded upon a climate 'the very opposite of ours. Finding how 

 little the "natives" know of their favorite art, and being, therefore, 

 by no means disposed to take advice of them, or unlearn any of 

 their old-world knowledge here, are they not, as a class, placed very 

 much in the condition of the aliens in a foreign country, we have 

 just alluded to, who refuse, for the most part, either to learn its lan- 

 guage, or adapt themselves to the institutions of that country ? We 

 think so ; for in fact, no two languages can be more different than 

 the gardening tongues of England and America. The ugly words 

 of English gardening, are damp, wet, want of sunshine, canker. Our 

 bugbears are drought, hot sunshine, great stimulus to growth, and 

 blights and diseases resulting from sudden checks. An English 

 gardener, therefore, is very naturally taught, as soon as he can lisp, 

 to avoid cool and damp aspects, to nestle like a lizard, on the sunny 

 side of south walls, to be perpetually guarding the roots of plants 

 against wet, and continually opening the heads of his trees and 

 shrubs, by thinning out the branches, to let the light in. He raises 

 even his flower-beds, to shed off the too abundant rain ; trains his 

 fruit-trees upon trellises, to expose every leaf to the sunshine, and is 



