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LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
“ Happy is he, who in a country life 
Shuns more perplexing toil and jarring strife ; 
Who lives upon the natal soil he loves, 
And sits beneath his old ancestral groves.” 
To this, let us add the complacent feelings, with which a man 
in old age, may look around him and behold these leafy mon- 
archs, planted by his boyish hands, and nursed by him in his 
youthful years, which have grown aged and venerable along 
with him ; 
“ A wood coeval with himself he sees, 
And loves his own contemporary trees.” 
Plantations in the Ancient Style. In the ar- 
rangement and culture of trees and plants in the ancient 
style of Landscape Gardening, we discover the evidences 
of the formal taste, — abounding with every possible variety 
of quaint conceits, and rife with whimsical expedients, 
so much in fashion during the days of Henry and Eliza- 
beth, and until the eighteenth century in England, and 
which is still the reigning mode in Holland, and parts of 
France. In these gardens, nature was tamed and subdued, or 
as some critics will have it, tortured into every shape which 
the ingenuity of the gardener could suggest ; and such kinds 
of vegetation as bore the shears most patiently, and when 
carefully trimmed, assumed gradually the appearance of 
verdant statues, pyramids, crowing cocks, and rampant lions, 
were the especial favourites of the gardeners of the old 
school.* The stately etiquette, and courtly precision of the 
manners of our English ancestors, extended into their gardens, 
* The unique ideal of the “ Garden of Eden,” by one of the old Dutch painters, 
with sheared hedges, formal alleys, and geometric plots of flowers, for the 
entertainment of our first parents, is, doubtless, familiar to our readers. 
