54 THE PAEKS AND GARDENS OP PARIS. [Chap. III. 



in all a lovely and wonderful host which certainly deserve some 

 better illustration in a national garden than they have already 

 had at the hands of the classifier. But when we come to think of 

 the extent and the wants of this varied country, the taste of its 

 people for the more refined branches of cultivation, and the vast 

 improvement that has in many districts to be wrought before the 

 land can enjoy in all its parts a full expression of the wealth and 

 happiness it is capable of producing, then we may see more fully 

 the great aid which a really worthy national garden would aflford 

 to France. Her now bare northern fields have to be made 

 beautiful and fertile ; her mountains have to be replanted. Here 

 is a reason, even if there were not twenty others as cogent, for a 

 worthy national arboretum. The gardens and orchards of France 

 have to be replenished ; the planting in her cities and towns made 

 more beautiful and varied ; the pure and invigdrating pleasures 

 and material benefits of good gardening have to be brought to the 

 doors of every owner of a rood of land; and in short there are 

 many objects of national importance which a Garden of Plants 

 worthy of Paris and of France could materially aid. But these 

 squares and these rows of clipped Limes, and narrow beds for trees 

 and shrubs, and railed-in compartments contrasted with bear-pits, 

 and the general aspect of barren formality, demean and ridicule 

 and blight the whole beautiful art of gardening and all that it 

 concerns. Let it not be supposed from the silence in France 

 on mismanagement of this kind that the evil effects noted are 

 only evil to the few who notice them. Those who see the errors 

 know how to avoid them. It is the public who visit places of 

 this kind, and naturally take them to be models of their kind, 

 who insensibly imbibe a harmful influence ^harmful to an 

 incalculable extent. 



Therefore, for many reasons there is no nobler work before the 

 municipality of Paris than the creation of a Garden of Plants 

 worthy of the name. The old one is a fitting site for museums, 

 for herbariums, for the skeletons of whales and the pits of bears, 

 or even for big glass sheds filled with sickly over-crowded plants, 

 but a fair garden it can never be made. 



A Garden of Plants worthy of France should not be much less 

 than a thousand acres in extent. If much larger spaces are 

 devoted to mere parks with a small variety of vegetation, and for 



