A FEW HINTS ON LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 121 



What the planting public need is to have their attention called 

 to the study of nature to be made to understand that it is in our 

 beautiful woodland slopes, with their undulating outlines, our broad 

 river meadows studded with single trees and groups allowed to grow 

 and expand quite in a state of free and graceful development, our 

 steep hills, sprinkled with picturesque pines and firs, and our deep 

 valleys, dark with hemlocks and cedars, that the real lessons in the 

 beautiful and picturesque are to be taken, which will lead us to the 

 appreciation of the finest elements of beauty in the embellishment of 

 our country places instead of this miserable rage for "trees of 

 heaven " and other fashionable tastes of the like nature. There are, 

 for example, to be found along side of almost every sequestered lawn 

 by the road-side in the northern States, three trees that are strikingly 

 remarkable for beauty of foliage, growth or flower, viz. : the tulip- 

 tree, the sassafras, and the pepperidge. The first is, for stately 

 elegance, almost unrivalled among forest trees : the second, when 

 planted in cultivated soil and allowed a fair chance, is more beauti- 

 ful in its diversified laurel-like foliage than almost any foreign tree 

 in our pleasure-grounds : and the last is not surpassed by the orange 

 or the bay in its glossy leaves, deep green as an emerald in summer, 

 and rich red as a ruby in autumn and all of them freer from the 

 attacks of insects than either larches, lindens, or elms, or a dozen 

 other favorite foreign trees, besides being unaffected by the summer 

 sun where horse-chestnuts are burned brown, and holding their foli- 

 age through all the season like native-born Americans, when foreign- 

 ers shrivel and die ; and yet we could name a dozen nurseries where 

 there is a large collection of ornamental trees of foreign growth, but 

 neither a sassafras, nor a pepperidge, nor perhaps a tulip-tree could 

 be had for love or money. 



There is a large spirit of inquiry and a lively interest in rural 

 taste, awakened on every side of us, at the present time, from Maine 

 to the valley of the Mississippi but the great mistake made by most 

 novices is that they study gardens too much, and nature too little. 

 Now gardens, in general, are stiff and graceless, except just so far as 

 nature, ever free and flowing, re-asserts her rights, in spite of man's 

 want of taste, or helps him when he has endeavored to work in her 

 own spirit. But the fields and woods are full of instruction, and in 



