PART VII. PICTURESQUE IMPROVEMENT. 375 



away from the idea of culture. The effect of wild strawberries,, 

 violets, and primroses, on the sides of some Welch hills, and the 

 effect of the alchemella alpina, thymus saxifraga oppositifolia, 

 and others upon many hills in the highlands of Scotland, 

 are singularly fine, and cannot well be conceived by those who 

 have always been accustomed to see the surface covered with a 

 carpet of rye-grass, or poa trivialis. It may be necessary to ob- 

 serve, that variations of the general clothing of the surface can 

 seldom be introduced, except where the wild, the romantic, or 

 the picturesque prevails in all the other parts of the scene. 

 Level meadows, lawns, or fertile open parks, can never be suc- 

 cessfully varied in this way ; as in those places such plants 

 would be both useless and incongruous. In all romantic or hilly 

 countries, however, there are banks, steeps, or rocky abrupt- 

 nesses, where variations of this kind are frequently found in 

 nature, and may often be heightened, or even sometimes intro- 

 duced, by art. Many examples of the effect of this kind of 

 improvement may be found on the high banks of dells or 

 bottoms containing brooks or rivers. There are several fine 

 instances on the Dove, near Matlock ; and at Melville 

 Castle, on the Esk, the cerastium and steliaria, under a wood 

 form varied and beautiful carpetings upon irregular declivities 

 at Mevisbank, the ajuga im purples the surface ; and on the 

 steep wooded banks which surround a secluded glen between, 

 Leith and Colington, the primrose and hyacinth in spring com-? 



