4 Notes on Gardens and Country Seats : — 



position to get through these. This, it is found from experience, 

 they cannot readily do. 



Mongensoell, Uvedale Price, Esq., novo occupied by Mrs. Ba- 

 thurst. — Our principal object, in visiting this place, was to see 

 if there wei'e any remains of the botany and gardening of the 

 celebrated Daines Barrington ; and of the landscape-garden- 

 ing of Major Price, an amateur, who assisted the late Bishop of 

 Durham in laying out some part of the grounds here, and who 

 laid out Frogmore, and also a small place at East Sheen near 

 Richmond, the residence of Lord Chief Baron Macdonald. We 

 were on the whole disappointed. Nothing remains that can be 

 attributed to Daines Barrington, and there is only a small flower- 

 garden, which, we were informed, was laid out by Major Price. 

 It is an irregular glade, partly surrounded by trees, but open to 

 the south, with a walk round it, and the turf varied by roundish 

 clumps. Altogether, it is very well designed, and it is kept very 

 neatly. The kitchen-garden is under the management of Mr. 

 Perry, formerly in business for himself at Leamington : his crops 

 of wall fruit are excellent, and the garden seems well managed. 

 The peach trees, when in blossom, are protected by beech boughs 

 with the leaves on ; the branches being cut green, and dried and 

 stacked for that purpose, as birch boughs are in some districts. 

 The fruit was now covered with cotton wadding, instead of wool, 

 to preserve it from the birds. In a conservatory there is a branch 

 of Araucaria excelsa planted in the ground, which has attained 

 the height of 12 ft.; the stem is half an inch in diameter at 1 ft. 

 above the ground, but increases to 1 in. in diameter at about half 

 its height. There is a large mass of woody matter at its root, 

 from which, we have no doubt, an upright shoot will, sooner or 

 later, be produced. The church is close by the house, and near 

 the latter are a flower-garden and an opaque-roofed green-house. 

 The plants were out, and their place was supplied by a large 

 table and several chairs ; on the table were bulbs, that the young 

 ladies, we were informed, were sorting, naming, and putting 

 away in bags for the planting season ; thus occupying themselves 

 at once usefully and agreeably. Close by the kitchen-garden we 

 met with Mr. Munn, a native of Bedfordshire, who has been 

 here 47 years ; part of the time as gardener, and the remainder 

 as steward and general manager of the estate. He is a fine 

 elderly gentleman-like man ; and, when we saw him, it being 

 evening, he had on his blue apron, with his watering-pot in his 

 hand for watering his own garden, and seemed to us a personi- 

 fied beau ideal of a gardener of the old school, such as we may 

 see in some of the frontispieces to the works of Mawe or Aber- 

 crombie. He is very intelligent, and, among other interesting 

 things, informed us that a sum of money was left for keeping up 

 for ever the fine old geometric gardens at Wrest Park, Bedford- 

 shire (see III. 245.), where he had been gardener in his youth. 



