1 98 Landscape- Gardening of Germany 



have been brought from all parts of the world to Europe, and 

 more especially to England, supplies the landscape-gardener with 

 an inexhaustible fund for decorating his grounds. There are thus 

 to be found numerous varieties of trees and shrubs, which, either 

 by their elegant growth, the picturesque disposition of their 

 branches and foliage, or by their beautiful flowers, belong to the 

 first class of ornaments for landscape-gardening. The palette 

 of the landscape-painter, if I may so express myself, is now 

 loaded with such a mass of colours and tints, that his means are 

 superabundant, compared with the work of art which he has to 

 create. That picturesque keeping, those rich ornaments, and 

 those magic charms, whereby the scenes of the landscape-garden 

 are distinguished from natural landscape, all afford resources of 

 which the landscape-gardener is enabled to avail himself; and 

 these have become so multiplied (for, compared with those known 

 even in Brown's time, they are increased tenfold), that the artist- 

 gardener is really involved in great embarrassment, to prevent 

 the superabundance of forms and colours, which he finds at his 

 command, from presenting a painful confusion of objects, instead 

 of uniting to form a perfect and beautiful whole. 



It might have been supposed that this richness of vegetation 

 would be highly advantageous to landscape-gardening in Eng- 

 land, where, formerly, the most classical models of the natural 

 garden style were to be found ; and that it would have given 

 immensely increased facilities to the artist for the execution of 

 his work : but, according to my experience, as I have already 

 stated, I found quite the contrary. Amidst the disproportionate 

 abundance of his materials, the artist knows not which to take 

 first: one is scarcely chosen, when he is attracted to another; 

 then to a third, a fourth, and so on. Each tree, and each shrub, 

 has some particular charm to recommend it, and, finally, that 

 none may be lost, he grasps them all. 



Thus I found the English gardens a real chaos of unconnected 

 beauties. Shrub adjoined shrub, and tree approached tree ; but, 

 instead of being disposed in grand masses, the separate kinds 

 were brought together only in small groups, as if the given 

 space, extensive as it might be, could contain plantations of 

 every species of plant. In such gardens, picturesque beauty is 

 sacrificed to a wilderness of forms and colours, and the result is 

 only an immense mosaic. Simplicity, the foundation of true 

 beauty, is entirely lost : the elevated grandeur of form, the de- 

 lightful distribution of varied colouring, the magical interchange 

 of tints, the delicate transitions from light to shade, from the 

 bright glowing objects of the parterre to the dark groves of deep 

 retiring plantations, no longer appear ; for these effects can only 

 be produced by the employment of trees and shrubs correspond- 

 ing in kind. England has lost all that had raised gardening to 



