kSECTION XIV. 



497 



wonderfully rapid grower, even in Britain. From tlie 1 2th vol. of the 

 Transactions of the Society of Arts, we learn that it has been known to 

 grow to the extraordinary height of five-and-forty feet in nineteen 

 years. 



Note XXVI. Page 870. 



Of pruning and training " for picturesque effect," no one will call in 

 question Mr Pontey's judgment, who has seen his late useful work on 

 laying out grounds, entitled, " The Rural Improver." From his 

 former treatise, however, professedly on pruning, named " The Forest 

 Pruner," some doubt might have been entertained on the subject ; and 

 especially from the frontispiece, where a representation is given of what 

 is called " the Woburn Beech," as a lawn tree properly pruned in the 

 Duke of Bedford's park. That the judicious author meant it as a model 

 of general pruning we cannot believe ; nor that the unsightly form 

 thus given to the tree, was for any other purpose than that of producing 

 the greatest possible profit ; which, however, there seems considerable 

 doubt if it would produce. Yet no remark is made by Mr Pontey on 

 the shocking violation of every rule of taste and law of nature which 

 is visible in the disfiguring of the tree. Had the elegant Gilpin, with 

 his picturesque ideas, ever beheld this enormous sweeping-brush, (seventy- 

 two feet in height, and pruned bare to fifty feet in the stem, without a 

 branch,) he assuredly would have started with horror at such a sight. 



But this memorable example of profitable pruning, unexplained and 

 unaccounted for as it stands, has not been without its ill eff'ects on some 

 of the unscientific among his readers. I knew a worthy nobleman, 

 now deceased, a man of competent intelligence on other subjects, who, 

 with the view of following out, as he imagined, the principles of Mr 

 Pontey^ of whom he was justly an admirer, actually pruned up every 

 lawn tree about his very splendid and well- wooded place, on the model 

 of the Woburn Beech ! ! ! — a species of destruction which two hundred 

 years to come will not repair to his posterity. 



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