18 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



refined perceptions of beauty are combined with them.' 

 And we may aad to this, that Landscape Gardening, which 

 is an artistical combination of the beautiful in nature and 

 art — an union of natural expression and harmonious culti- 

 vation — ^is capable of affording us the highest and most in- 

 tellectual enjoj-iWent to be found in any cares or pleasures 

 belonging to the soil. 



The development of the Beautiful is the end and aim of 

 Landscape Gardening, as it is of all other fine arts. The 

 ancients sought to. attain this by a studied and elegant 

 regularity of design in their gardens ; the moderns, by the 

 creation or improvement of grounds which, though of limit- 

 ed extent, exhibit a highly graceful or picturesque epitome 

 of natural beauty. Landscape Gardening differs from gar- 

 dening in its common sense, in embracing the whole scene 

 immediately about a country house, which it softens and 

 refines, or renders more spirited and striking by the aid of 

 art. In it we seek to embody our ideal of a rural home ; 

 not through plots of fruit trees, and beds of choice flowers, 

 though these have their place, but by collecting and combin- 

 ing beautifurforms in trees, surfaces of ground, buildings, 

 and walks, in the landscape surrounding us. It is, in short, 

 the Beautiful, embodied in a home scene. And we attain 

 it by the removal or concealment of everything uncouth 

 and discordant, arid by the introduction and pteservation of 

 forms pleasing in their expression, their outUnes, and their 

 fitness for the abode of man. In the orchard, we hope to 

 gratify the palate ; in the flower garden, the eye and the 

 smell ; but in the landscape garden we appeal to that sense 

 of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the high- 

 est attributes of our nature. 



This embellishment of nature, which we call Landscape 



