HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 173 
A landscape may be considered natural, if we find in it all those produc- 
tions whicli "we meet in a forest, except its redundances. All the indigenous 
plants must be there, though they may grow in a better condition, and in a 
less crowded entanglement than in the wilderness. The trees may have a 
wider spread, and the shrubbery may grow more independently outside of 
the woods instead of forming only a meagre undergrowth. The hand of 
man may have assisted the plants to obtain their full development, without 
excluding any species. The birds and other animals that are the true ten- 
ants of the wildwood must also be present, whose appearance, in moderate 
numbers, is the best evidence that the harmony of nature has not been dis- 
turbed. 
We find in the primitive forest an entangled and crowded growth, and an 
excess of humidity, that render the charms of nature unavailable to us, and 
many places inaccessible. A great entanglement obstructs our passage and 
interferes with the course of vegetation, Man, by removing these impedi- 
ments, does, in truth, render nature the more natural, as a plant becomes 
more natural when removed from a dark cellar into the open air. So long 
as no species of plant is destroyed which would be found in the place, if it 
had not been subjected to culture, and so long as each plant and animal en- 
joys its native habitats and circumstaeces of growth, the landscape has not 
been denaturalized by the removal of redundances. 
The word natural is not sufficiently precise to be conveniently used in 
philosophical discussion. I should prefer a term which is more specific, and 
had not been generalized into unmeaningness by universal bad use. The 
term used should express a combination of all the properties and character- 
istics of a wild scene, divested of its inconveniences and of everything that 
interferes with the growth and development of all those plants which nature 
is struggling to produce, from the minutest moss or lichen, to the tall pine 
or the wide-spreading oak. Just so far as we improve the development of 
the indigenous plants and animals, without deranging their natural propor- 
tions and relations to one another, do we improve nature without destroying 
her characteristics. Nature, when left to herself, admits of an excessive 
crowding of species : and it is only in occasional situations that she is ena- 
bled to afford any one tree or other plant its full proportions. 
Though it might be averred that a scene is more natural in which every- 
thing has grown up with these imperfections, we might with the same pro- 
priety contend that the dense and stived population of a crowded city, only 
half developed in their physical proportions from the want of light and 
fresh air, are more natural than the well developed inhabitants of the coun- 
