n. 



HOW TO POPULARIZE THE TASTE FOR PLANTING. 



July, 1852. 



HOW to popularize that taste for rural beauty, which gives to 

 every beloved home in the country its greatest outward charm, 

 and to the country itself its highest attraction, is a question which 

 must often occur to many of our readers. A traveller never jour- 

 neys through England without lavishing all the epithets of admira- 

 tion on the rural beauty of that gardenesque country; and his 

 praises are as justly due to the way-side cottages of the humble 

 laborers (whose pecuniary condition of life is far below that of our 

 numerous small householders), as to the great palaces and villas. 

 Perhaps the loveliest and most fascinating of the " cottage homes," 

 of which Mrs. Hemans has so touchingly sung, are the clergymen's 

 dwellings in that country ; dwellings, for the most part, of very mod- 

 erate size, and no greater cost than are common in all* the most 

 thriving and populous* parts of the Union but which, owing to the 

 love of horticulture, and the taste for something above the merely 

 useful, which characterizes their owners, as a class, are, for the most 

 part, radiant with the bloom and embellishment of the loveliest 

 flowers and shrubs. 



The contrast with the comparatively naked and neglected coun, 

 try dwellings that are the average rural tenements of our country at 

 large, is very striking. Undoubtedly, this is, in part, owing to the 

 fact that it takes a longer time, as Lord Bacon said a century ago, 

 " to garden finely than to build stately." But the newness of our 

 civilization is not sufficient apology. If so, we should be spared the 



