atid of Riiral Improvement, during 1835. 621 



confined to gentlemen's gardens. This improvement, as we have 

 elsewhere stated, is chiefly owing to the exertions of the horticul- 

 tural societies, and partly also to the benevolent and patriotic 

 exertions of some gentlemen, who authorise their head gardeners 

 to supply the cottagers on their estates with such useful and 

 ornamental plants as can be spared, and are suitable for cottage 

 gardens. Various gentlemen, also, in different parts of the 

 country, require their head gardeners to keep a nursery of fruit 

 trees and fruit shrubs to be given away to their farmers and cot- 

 tagers. When we consider how greatly the beauty of the mar- 

 gins of all our roads is increased by this practice, and how much 

 it tends to increase the comfort and happiness of the cottager, we 

 cannot too highly express our admiration of such practices. We 

 only wish they might prevail everywhere, and that every pro- 

 prietor of land in Great Britain or Ireland would adopt them. 

 A superior description of cottage, and an improved mode of 

 cookery, are the next steps in the amelioration of the condition 

 of the country labourer; and we should like much to see them in- 

 cluded in the objects of the provincial horticultural societies. 



Commercial Gardening has been considered as rather in a 

 declining state for some years past, owing, in market-gardening, 

 to the lowness of prices, and, in nursery-gardening, to the want 

 of demand. The lowness of the prices of culinary vegetables 

 and fruits being occasioned by the immense supplies of British 

 growth, and also by the influx of some descriptions of fruit from 

 the Continent, must necessarily lead to a fall in the rent of gar- 

 den ground in Britain ; and this, indeed, to a certain extent has 

 already taken place. The nursery business has, within the last 

 twenty years, undergone a material change. Formerly all ex- 

 tensive planters in the country, whether of fruit trees or of forest 

 trees, procured them chiefly from the London or Edinburgh 

 nurseries ; whereas now all the forest trees, and the more com- 

 mon of the fruit trees, are procured by planters from nurseries 

 in their immediate neighbourhood ; and the demand on the 

 metropolitan nurseries is limited to the less common articles, or 

 to what is new. This, to the public in general, and more espe- 

 cially to country gentlemen, is a very desirable change, since it 

 enables them not only to procure their plants from a nursery 

 where less rent is paid, and, of course, at less expense, having 

 also less to pay for carriage ; but, from the plants having been 

 less time out of ground, there is far less risk of losing them from 

 the check given to them by the removal. This change, however, 

 as in the case of all states of transition, has been attended with 

 serious losses to the London nurserymen, more especially to 

 those who have extensive grounds, and who continue to pay 

 high rents for them. To these high rents, and to the very long 

 credit generally taken by country gentlemen, must be attributed, 



