388 Recollections of a Gardening Tour. 



The taste displayed in the grounds at Allanton is in general 

 good. One or two defects have been pointed out by Mr. Nes- 

 field which might be remedied. It is pleasing to see evidence 

 of the enthusiastic delight which Sir Henry must have had in 

 improving his place, in an extensive plantation made at his ex- 

 pense on a hill belonging to an adjoining proprietor. Had this 

 hill remained as it was, a naked moor, it occupies so large a 

 space in the views from the grounds and house at Allanton, that 

 it would have been a sad blemish in a landscape the chief merit 

 of which is being wooded and rich in the midst of a compara- 

 tively naked and meagre country. The manner in which the 

 single trees are scattered along the two approach roads, both of 

 considerable length, so as to form foregrounds to the distant 

 scenery, without destroying breadth of effect, deserves to be 

 studied by the gardener ; and not less so the manner in which 

 the trees are grouped in the interior of the park. 



The young plantations here are so thick, that, if not thinned 

 in a very short time, such of them as have been planted as 

 screens will defeat the object, by admitting the light and a view 

 of the public road between their naked stems. The Turkey oak 

 and the Norway maple thrive remarkably well in these planta- 

 tions, and, what we were rather surprised at, we found a number 

 of trees of Acex hybi-idum; not, however, so luxuriant as they 

 are in the Horticultural Society's garden, the tree being indige- 

 nous on the mountains of Naples. In the kitchen-garden grapes 

 are ripened annually, about the middle of April ; the price of 

 coal here being only 4s. per ton. Tile-draining is going ex- 

 tensively forward in the park and farm lands, and is found to 

 pay well, even when it costs 10/. or 12/. per acre. On the 

 whole, we were much gratified with Allanton and with the kind 

 and hospitable reception given our party by Lady Seaton Steuart, 

 who well merits the compliment paid to her by Mr. Nesfield. 



Milton Lock/iart, the seat of — Lockhart, Esq., M.P., brother 

 to the celebrated editor of the Quarterly Review, is a very old place, 

 celebrated in Old Mortality as the residence of Claverhouse. A 

 new house, by Burns, in his peculiar combination of the old Scotch, 

 or Belgian, style and the Tudor Gothic, is just finished. It 

 stands on a prominent point of a peninsula formed by a remark- 

 able turn of the Clyde ; which, after washing the base of the bank 

 on which the house stands, darts away from it across the valley, 

 and, after a course of, we should suppose, above a mile, returns to 

 another bank near the house, enclosing, as it were in a loop, a 

 beautiful piece of meadow scenery, fringed with trees on the 

 banks of the river. We confess, however, that our recollections of 

 these features are insufficient to do them justice. The approach 

 to the house is over the Clyde, on a lofty bridge of a single arch 

 built by Mr. Lockhart; and the steep banks between the river 



