54 



THE planter's GUIDE. 



process successful in insuring the after vigour of the trees, 

 (which it is far from doing,) still their beauty would 

 thereby for a long while be lost. It is true that time, 

 the great restorer of defects, as well as destroyer of beauty, 

 among the vegetable tribe, may partially cover these 

 imperfections. But the immediate effect of wood, and 

 the dehghtful creation of park-scenery, are thus missed by 

 the planter himself, as his subjects, for years, look like the 

 sickly offspring of art, not the free produce of nature. It 

 seems, therefore, evident that some better and more 

 scientific system is still wanting for the advancement of 

 transplanting — a system which should unite certainty of 

 success with a moderate expenditure — in order to bring 

 the art into general use. 



Thus I have endeavoured to give, as briefly as possible, 

 the history and progress of the art of removing large trees, 

 from the earliest times down to the present. We have 

 seen that it was a practice well known to the Greeks — 

 always considered as desirable, but next to impossible to 

 be carried into effect, by that ingenious people : that in 

 the hands of the Romans, if it did not altogether retro- 

 grade, it was in a condition little better than that in 

 which the Greeks had left it : that in modern Europe it 

 revived with the revival of learning, and seemed for a 

 while to advance with the improvements of luxury — in 

 the hands, however, of one of the most powerful monarchs 

 that Europe ever saw, it did not rise beyond the rank of 

 a mechanical art : and finally, in those of the most 

 cultivated nation of modern times — a nation, too, which 

 has added one more to the number of the fine arts — it still 

 remains a practice without a foundation in fixed principles. 

 It is regarded by their best practical writers as wholly 

 unfit for general purposes, as limited in its application, 

 and hazardous and uncertain in its execution. 



