Chap. XYI.] A FEW NOTES ON PRIVATE GARDENS. 257 



out that the artificial water here, as in too many gardens, is 

 rather too much after the duck-pond pattern— too abrupt in its 

 margins, and too near the house. With a graceful bend of the 

 Seine glistening through one of the vistas, it would haye been 

 wiser to dispense with artificial water. Such contrasts remind 

 us of the full moon and stars calmly shining down on a Bond- 

 street illumination. 



It has long been a fashion with continental lovers of gardening 

 to employ Englishmen to form their gardens ; and, among those 

 so formed, there is none more remarkable than Paxton's work at 

 Ferrieres, the seat of Baron Eothschild, which is an oasis amid 

 the dreary fields of this part of France. The house, as well as 

 the grounds and almost everything about the place, was the work 

 of Englishmen, and the gardens show an instructive mixture of 

 the best features of the horticulture of both countries. The house 

 is, of course, fortified with a terrace-garden, but this is not too 

 extensive nor overdone with " bedding-out." On its steps, one 

 day, Jules Favre met Bismarck, when he went to plead in vain 

 the cause of prostrate France. The king and Bismarck had their 

 quarters here when the Germans overran the plains around, and 

 gave orders that not a hand was to be laid on anything. Had it 

 been otherwise, the specimen Wellingtonias might have suffered 

 the ignoble fate of thousands of fine garden-trees around Paris 

 during the siege. Probably the finest Orangery in any private 

 garden in France is here, and the Orangery-system of cultivating 

 plants is here seen in its best aspect. Nothing can exceed the 

 health and beauty of the specimens grown in enormous but well- 

 designed tubs, and standing so close together that the dense heads 

 touch, and one seems in an Orange-grove. In addition to the many 

 Orange-trees, there are superb pyramidal Myrtles, nearly twenty 

 feet high, in tubs ; numbers of tubs of the New Zealand Flax and 

 large specimens of the Australasian Araucarias, which do well 

 treated thus. The plan of planting-out Palms and many other 

 fine-foliaged plants in a large house, and with an eye to picturesque 

 effect, is here well carried out, and the effect very good at all 

 seasons. The fresh green Lycopodium denticulatum forms, as 

 usual, the turf of the small landscape in which the flowers look so 

 well. Among trees, good specimens of the weeping Sophora are 

 employed with fine, effect near the water at Ferrieres, Perhaps 



