126 Hints on Landscape Gardening 



The reader may easily follow this description 

 on the plan (Plate ^), where the region is 

 shown as it used to be. He will further observe 

 how directly in front of the town the Neisse 

 meadows broaden out to the east, a completely 

 level valley through which the river runs for its 

 entire length. In this level place lie the old and 

 new castle, with their outbuildings, the theater, 

 stables, etc., close by the town, and a few hun- 

 dred paces farther a manor house as it used to 

 be and other buildings, now merely an old- 

 fashioned mill, the farmhouse, and some out- 

 buildings to which formerly a street of the town 

 near the castle used to lead. 



The castle itself was surrounded on the other 

 side of the moats and fortifications by French 

 and kitchen gardens, later by a few of the novel 

 pseudo-English gardens, misunderstood in the 

 usual way that I have described as typical of the 

 Fatherland, but also by some remarkably fine 

 and wide linden avenues, which a foolish gar- 

 dener had partly decapitated, to protect, a badly 

 placed orange house from the probable fall of 

 such large trees. The same absurdity was re- 

 peated farther on, where a pheasantry was placed 

 between meadows and deciduous forests. Several 

 'giant firs have been either destroyed entirely, or 

 at least deprived of their crowns, under the pre- 

 text that an old, half-blind pheasant keeper could 

 not, it was presumed, shoot the birds of prey 

 which were wont to settle on the tops of the 

 trees. The remaining portion of the level space 



