WOBURN ABBEY. 535 



line upwards of 1,000 feet long. A fine specimen of the latter tree, 

 twenty-five or thirty feet high, attracted my attention, and there 

 was another, twenty-five feet, of the beautiful Norfolk Island pine, 

 growing in the open ground, with the shelter of a glazed frame in 

 winter. These pleasure-grounds, however, interested me most in 

 that portion called the American garden several acres of sloping 

 velvety turf, thickly dotted with groups of rhododendrons, azaleas, 

 <fec., forming the richest masses of dark green foliage that it is pos- 

 sible to conceive. In the months of May and June, when these are 

 in full bloom, this must be a scene of almost dazzling brilliancy. 

 The soil for them had all been formed artificially, and consisted of a 

 mixture of peat and white sand, in which the rhododendrons and 

 kalmias seemed to thrive admirably. 



Besides this scene, there is a garden composed wholly of heaths, 

 the beds cut in the turf, one species in each bed, and full of delicate 

 bells ; a parterre flower-garden in which a striking effect was pro- 

 duced by contrasting vases colored quite black, with rich masses 

 (growing in the vases) of scarlet geraniums. I also saw a garden 

 devoted wholly to willows, and another to grasses both the most 

 complete collections of these two genera in the world the taste of 

 the former Duke and with which I was familiar beforehand, 

 through the " Salictum Woburnense" and Mr. Sinclair's work on 

 the " Grasses of Woburn" 



The park is the richest in large evergreens of any that I have 

 ever seen. The planting taste of the former Duke has produced at 

 the present moment, after a growth of fifty or sixty years, the most 

 superb results. The Cedars of Lebanon the most sublime and 

 venerable of all trees, and the grandest of all evergreens, bore off 

 the palm though all the rare pines and firs that were known to 

 arboriculturists half a century ago are here in the greatest perfection 

 including hollies and Portugal laurels which one is accustomed 

 to think of as shrubs, with great trunks like timber trees and mag- 

 nificent heads of glossy foliage. A grand old silver fir has a 

 straight trunk eighty feet high, and a lover of trees could spend 

 weeks here without exhausting the arboricultural interest of the 

 park alone which is, to be sure, some ten or twelve miles round. 



A very picturesque morceau in the park, inclosed and forming 



