84 
GARDEN ARCHITECTURE. 
The same author seems to indicate that the laurel was not an unusual arbour 
plant in his time. 
" Turn spissa ramis laurea fervidos 
Excludet ictus." 
Carm., Lib. 2. Od. 15, v. 9. 
And as the bay {Ld^uriis nohilis) thrives and grows to an astonishing height in 
Italy — as, for instance, that in the Borromean islands, on the Lago Maggiore, on 
which Napoleon inscribed the word " Battaglia," the evening- before Marengo, 
which is upwards of sixty-feet in height — it seems probable that it was this plant 
that was used. To the present day Italy is a land of bowers ; the vines, all over 
the country, either hang festooned between the elms, as when Virgil wrote his 
Georgics, or are trained horizontally on flat trelliag-es, to catch and intercept the 
sun, and thus form continual arbours : but we anticipate, to trace with laborious 
minuteness the history of arbours, would not be in place here ; we therefore pro- 
ceed to consider the various species of arbours, their modes of construction, the 
proper materials for their formation, their various styles, and their suitable 
localities. 
Arbours may be divided into such as are purely natural, partly natural, and 
partly artificial, and such as are entirely the result of art. 
Of the first are those formed by the banyan-fig, in tropical countries, whose 
lateral and widely-extended branches send down numerous shoots, which fix them- 
selves in the ground ; becoming stems, and forming 
" A pillared shade with echoing walks between." 
Such are those formed by our various weeping varieties of forest trees : the 
weeping ash, birch, beech, elm, willow, cytisus, &c., &c. 
Flo-. 1 . Fig. 2. 
Figs. I and 2. — These with their lithe and tenuous branches waving with 
every summer breeze, and as here and there they sometimes part their textile 
boughs, and letting in the flickering sun-beam chequer the verdant floor with light 
and shade, are the most truly natural, and perhaps the most delightful, of any kind 
of arbour. 
