SECTION XII. 



467 



Note VIII. Page 808. 



It is a thing well known to any person who has attended to the 

 subject, that, extensive as the business of arboriculture in Scotland is, 

 nothing can be more injudicious than the way in which it is managed. 

 A principle is adopted, completely at variance with the professed object 

 in view ; and that principle is carried through with such ill-judged per- 

 sistency, as almost wholly to defeat the object. 



A space of ground is selected, the richest that can be found near a 

 great cit}^ — usually garden ground, that has been in cultivation for ages. 

 A profusion of rich manure is immediately poured into it, to a potato 

 or turnip crop, after which acorns and other tree seeds are thinly sown 

 in beds, and seedlings of every sort rush up as close as they can stand 

 together. After a twelvemonth or two, as the case may be, these seed- 

 lings are transplanted into rows as densely compacted ; and he who 

 knows the judicious distances, whether between the rows or the plants, 

 prescribed b}^ the Millers, the Boutchers, or the Hanburys, as essen- 

 tially necessary to their success, will stand aghast at the contrast here 

 exhibited. At the end of two years more of a severe struggle of the 

 weak with the strong, in a soil and climate equally hostile to both, the 

 whole are planted out, in the most sterile tracts and the highest eleva- 

 tions. And what is the nurseryman's object, by so strange and 

 unnatural a process ? Why, to raise, as he is expected to do, the 

 greatest possible number of plants on the smallest extent of surface, and 

 to furnish them to his customers at the lowest possible price. 



In respect to the style of plants so injudiciously drawn up, their 

 fibrousness of root, their strength of stem, their number of side-branches, 

 the utter deficiency in these, and other properties which they should 

 possess, will appear at a single glance to the intelligent reader. But 

 to the nurseryman, these things are of no consequence whatever. He 

 knows very well that his employers, in ninety-nine cases out of a hun- 

 dred, can form no judgment on such points. Noblemen and gentlemen 

 may know something of breeding or of feeding stock ; but a knowledge 

 of wood is not the fashion of the day. They must, in that department, 

 see through the eyes and hear through the ears of their gardeners ; and 

 almost every gardener in the kingdom owes his situation, directly or 

 indirectly, to the nurseryman. Without therefore supposing a degree 

 of virtue that is superhuman in this class of men, we can conceive no 

 great improvement of the system to originate with them ; and we may 

 easily imagine how the extensive plantations, now in progress for 

 years, are and have been supplied with plants-. As to the scale of mag- 

 nitude on which this branch of trade is conducted in Edinburgh, it 



