Forbes' s Journal of a Horticultural Tour. 317 



ber of the Horticultural Society, Author of '* Hortus Woburn- 

 ensis," &c- 8v0j pp. 164. 



The Duke of Bedford, who spends his princely fortune in a 

 manner every way worthy of a benevolent and enlightened mind, 

 with his usual anxiety for the promotion of useful knowledge, 

 very liberally and kindly proposed, in the autumn of 1835, 

 " that his head gardener, Mr. Forbes, should undertake a hor- 

 ticultural tour through sevei'al parts of Germany, Belgium, and 

 France, with a view of inspecting the different collections and 

 productions cultivated in some of the most celebrated horticul- 

 tural establishments in these countries." In the work before us 

 Mr. Forbes has submitted to the public a cursory detail of the 

 various gardens and objects that came under his observation, 

 during a tour occupying eight weeks; and during which period 

 he visited the following towns and places, and the gardens 

 around them: — Hamburg, Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden, Nurem- 

 berg, Munich, Augsburg, Ulm, Eslingen, Stuttgardt, Baden, 

 Rastadt, Carlsruhe, Schwetzingen, Heidelberg, Darmstadt, 

 Frankfort, Coblentz, Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Neuss, AIk- 

 la-Chapelle, Liege, Namur, Mons, Ath, Engheim, Brussels, 

 Waterloo, Ghent, Antwerp, Malines, Louvain, Valenciennes, 

 Paris (where, at the Jardin des Plantes, Mr. Forbes found 

 Mr. W. Douglas, a young man lately sent to that garden by the 

 Duke of Devonshire), Versailles, Montreuil, Vitry, Rouen, 

 Dieppe, Brighton; where he arrived on October l^., having left 

 London on August 19. 



We have accompanied Mr. Forbes through all these places, 

 and the gardens round them, with much pleasure ; this being, 

 no doubt, greatly enhanced by our having seen almost the whole 

 of them more than once. We wish, for the sake of encouraffino; 

 other gentlemen to indulge their gardeners in such a trip, that 

 Mr. Forbes had stated the expense; but this, exclusive of pur- 

 chases, and of the expense of the packet to and from England, 

 could not, we think, amount to more than 10/- or 12/, a week. 

 A wealthy and liberal proprietor might indulge his gardener 

 with two or three weeks' expenses, from one or all of the follow- 

 ing motives : as a reward for good conduct, as a means of his 

 gardener's personal improvement, and as a means of procuring 

 new plants to enrich his collection, and establishing a gardening 

 correspondence for the same object. 



The following extract from the preface will give a very good 

 idea of what a gardener may expect as a result of a few weeks' 

 visit to the Continent : — 



" The reader will easily understand," Mr. Forbes observes, " that it required 

 the utmost diligence on my part to fulfil the objects I had in view. Yet I 

 was enabled to investigate such modes of culture as were adopted in the 

 principal gardens, where the produce appeared in any way superior to our 



