60 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
prairie too,) should always, in the hands of the man of 
wealth, be made to display all the freeness and beauty of the 
Graceful school. 
But there are many persons with small, cottage places, 
of little decided character, who have neither room, time, 
nor income, to attempt the improvement of their grounds 
fully, after either of those two schools. How shall they 
render their places tasteful and agreeable, in the easiest 
manner? We answer, by attempting only the simple and 
the natural ; and the unfailing way to secure this, is by 
employing only trees and grass. A soft verdant lawn, and 
a few forest or ornamental trees, well grouped, give universal 
pleasure — they contain in themselves, in fact, the basis of 
all our agreeable sensations in a landscape garden — (natural 
beauty, and the recognition of art,) and they are the most 
enduring sources of enjoyment in any place. There are 
no country seats, in the United States, so unsatisfactory and 
tasteless as those in which, without any definite aim, every 
thing is attempted ; and a mixed jumble of discordant forms, 
materials, ornaments, and decorations, is assembled — a part 
in one style and a bit from another, without the least feeling 
of unity, or congruity. These rural bedlams, full of all 
kinds of absurdities, without a leading character or expres- 
sion of any sort, cost their owners a vast deal of trouble, 
and money, without giving a tasteful mind, a shadow of 
the beauty which it feels, at the first glimpse of a neat cot- 
tage residence, with its simple, sylvan character of well kept 
lawn and trees. If the latter does not rank high in the 
scale of Landscape Gardening, as an art, it embodies much of 
its essence, as a source of enjoyment — the production of the 
beautiful in country residences. 
Besides the beauties of form and expression in the difie- 
