21 



the park, we may have stony ravines shaded with trees and made 

 picturesque with shrubs, the Tonus and arrangement of which re- 

 mind us of mountain scenery. We may perhaps even secure some 

 slight approach to the mystery, variety and richness of tropical 

 scenery, by an assemblage of certain forms of vegetation, gay with 

 flowers, and intricate and mazy with vines and creepers, ferns, 

 rushes and hroad-leaved plants. But all we can do in these direc- 

 tions must be confessedly imperfect, and suggestive rather than sat- 

 isfying to the imagination. It must, therefore, be made incidental 

 and strictly subordinate to our first purpose. 



1 Living formed these general plans, we find, in further study- 

 ing the site, its most important circumstance to be the fact, that a 

 large body of trees already exist upon it, not too old to be improved, 

 yet already old enough to be of considerable importance in a lands- 

 scape. These trees are in two principal divisions, between which a 

 space of two or three hundred feet in width is found, of undulating' 

 ground, not wdiolly ungraceful, and now mainly covered with a 

 ragged turf. A few trees stand out singly upon this space. It is 

 more nearly level, and less occupied by trees, than any other por- 

 tion of the site. There is no rock in place upon it, nor would it be 

 at all impracticable to reduce its few abrupt and graceless hillocks, 

 and fill up its gravel pits and muck holes. If we imagine this to 

 be 'done, and then look at it in connection with the surrounding 

 groves, it is obvious that all that is required to form here a fair ex- 

 ample of pastoral scenery is, first, an improvement of the turf, and, 

 secondly, greater space, K so that the observer may not see all the 

 boundaries of free sunlight before him at a glance. The former 

 requirement is certainly within our power, all that is needed to 

 secure it being the drainage, deep tillage and enrichment of the soil, 

 and the substitution of finer grasses for the present coarse grasses 

 and weeds. Something may be done also with regard to the 

 second, by cutting in upon the borders of the woods, where the 

 ground lies in gentle slopes, leaving only the finer trees to stand out 

 singly, or in small groups, upon the turf to be formed upon the new 

 ground thus obtained. Were this done, however, the open space 

 would still be comparatively an unimportant one in relation to the 

 whole park. The observer would take it all in at a glance, and if 

 this were all he felt that he could look for, the result would be tan- 

 talizing rather than satisfactory. 



As a very important suggestion springs from this observation, we 



