312 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
time lias given it the benefit of its softening touches, if it 
has been thus properly executed, will not be much inferior 
to those matchless bits of fine landscape. A more striking 
and artistical effect will be produced by substituting for 
native trees and shrubs, common on the banks of streams 
and lakes in the country, only rare foreign shrubs, vines, 
and aquatic plants of hardy growth, suitable for such 
situations. While these are arranged in the same manner 
as the former, from their comparative novelty, especially 
in such sites, they will at once convey the idea of refined 
and elegant art. 
If any person will take the trouble to compare a piece of 
water so formed, when complete, with the square or circular 
sheets or ponds now in vogue among us, he must indeed be 
little gifted with an appreciation of the beautiful, if he do 
not at once perceive the surpassing merit of the natural 
style. In the old method, the banks, level, or rising on all 
sides, without any or but few surrounding trees, carefully 
gravelled along the edge of the water, or what is still worse, 
walled up, slope away in a tame, dull, uninteresting grass 
field. In the natural method, the outline is varied, some- 
times receding from the eye, at others stealing out, and 
inviting the gaze — the banks here slope off gently with a 
gravelly beach, and there rise abruptly in different heights, 
abounding with hollows, projections, and eminences, show- 
ing various colored locks and soils, intermingled with a 
luxuriant vegetation of all sizes and forms, corresponding to 
the different situations. Instead of allowing the sun to 
pour down in one blaze of light, without any objects to 
soften it with their shade, the thick overhanging groups and 
masses of trees cast, here and there, deep cool shadows. 
Stealing through the leaves and branches, the sun-beams 
