Landsca_pe-Gardens. 663 



Facsimile Imitations of Natural Scenery cannot be considered 

 as belonging to gardening as an art of culture, because in them 

 all appearance of culture is to be avoided ; and they cannot be 

 considered as belonging to gardening as a fine ai't, because it is 

 not intended that the result shall be recognised as the work of 

 art, but that it shall be mistaken for nature itself; in short, 

 that the spectator shall be imposed upon. Such gardens do not 

 require to be made by gardeners : any person possessing a 

 painter's eye, and assisted by country labourers, masons, and car- 

 penters, will form them just as well as a landscape-gardener. 

 They may very properly be called Mechanical Imitations of Na- 

 ture. 



The situations where, as a matter of curiosity and surprise, it 

 might be desirable to produce a fac-simile imitation of natural 

 scenery, we may suppose to be in the heart of a great city, or 

 in its immediate neighbourhood. Suppose, in a central part of 

 Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, there was an immense gra- 

 vel pit : let the bottom of it be covered with turf, smooth in 

 in some places, and in others mixed with nettles, thistles, and 

 other weeds, and varied by thorns, briars, brambles, elder 

 bushes, and other trees and shrubs that generally spring up on 

 waste ground. In one or two parts of the bottom of the pit let 

 there be pools of water, with rushes and other aquatic plants, 

 and some alders, and willows of the commonest kind, for shade. 

 These and other details being executed in the bottom of the pit, 

 surround it on the outside by a thick plantation of one or two 

 kinds of trees and shrubs, such as are generally found in copse- 

 wood ; and let there be a winding straggling path through this 

 copse-wood, of such a length as to obliterate for the moment 

 the impression of the scenery of the park or gardens on the 

 mind of the spectator. If the plantation were surrounded by a 

 hedge or other fence, and the entrance to the path were through 

 a gap in this fence, the deception would be the more complete. 



A higher character than the above, but which should be equally 

 mistaken for nature, or the result of fortuitous circumstances, 

 might be produced as follows. Instead of a crooked footpath 

 entering through a gap in a hedge, a rough winding road might 

 be formed, by which it might be supposed the gravel had been 

 carted out of the pit, but which, owing to the lapse of time, 

 had become principally covered with grass ; and this might be 

 entered through an old rickety gate; while in the bottom of 

 the pit there might be the remains of some miserable hovels, 

 and a person living in one of them, keeping a cow, and hav- 

 ing, in consequence, a hay-rick rudely fenced round, a small 

 stack of faggots for fuel, or, perhaps, an ass and a cart, &c. 

 The reader can easily supply the rest. Both these examples 

 would be fac-simile imitations, which might easily be mistaken 



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