270 Horticultural Notes : — 



Capua. — Our rooms at the inn at Capua, where we slept, 

 opened on a terraced garden, with orange trees, vines trained 

 on arched trellises, marble fountains, &c, which, for ten 

 shillings' expense, might have been made very gay and attrac- 

 tive ; but all was forlornness and disorder, the beds untrimmed, 

 and the walks littered with dirt. Two magnificent plants of 

 Opuntia vulgaris, which flanked one of the windows, the waiter 

 said, were planted there " per pompa" (for pomp's sake) ; a 

 motive, unfortunately, so often the leading one in Italy, with- 

 out any regard to the humbler ones of neatness and order. 

 On the opposite side of the street, however, we espied, on the 

 ramparts, what is a great rarity in the small towns of Italy, 

 a public garden ; which, though disfigured by a profusion of 

 ugly temples, grottoes, &c, was of tolerable extent, with 

 handsome parterres of flowers, and trees of sufficient growth 

 to give shade; the whole kept very neatly, and forming a 

 great ornament to the town. 



Caserta. — The gardens of this vast and magnificent country 

 palace of the King of Naples are not a very favourable speci- 

 men of the old style of gardening. There are no trees of the 

 luxuriant growth of those which adorn the Boboli garden at 

 Florence, or that of the Villa Borghese at Rome; and the 

 row of evergreen oaks on each side of the great canal, being 

 kept clipped to the height of only about 15 ft., have a very 

 stunted and paltry look. On the whole, this is among the 

 few old gardens which one would not regret to see converted 

 into a jardin Anglais [English garden], as far as practicable ; 

 and, perhaps, all the old gardens would be much improved, 

 without losing their distinctive character, by one simple alter- 

 ation, the substitution of the pruning-knife for the shears; 

 and, while the vistas and alleys were preserved, permitting at 

 least their upper branches to assume a natural mode of 

 growth. Turf, extremely rough, as it always is on the Con- 

 tinent, yet without bare patches ; and so far proving, like the 

 scores of plots of grass to be seen in Italy (as in front of the 

 cathedral at Pisa, and the church of S. Giovanni in Laterano, 

 at Rome, &c. &c), with as short and fine a turf of white 

 clover, &c, as most village greens in England, that the notion 

 of the heat being an insuperable obstacle to having fine grass 

 in the south of Europe is erroneous ; and I am persuaded 

 that, if due attention were given to having a proper soil, suf- 

 ficiently retentive of moisture, it would be easy to have grass 

 plots in Italy, if treated in the same way as to rolling and 

 mowing, very little inferior to what are seen with us. Bundles 

 of green lupine plants pulled up by the roots, and of the 

 roots of couch grass which we burn but which the Italians 



