GENERAL REMARKS. 
429 
ily ensue. A willow drooping over a rustic bridge, and 
a pine waving its giant limbs on a rocky eminence, are 
each charming in their place, because in harmony with 
surrounding nature ; but pines and willows alternating 
around a house, or on a flat approach road, are most 
discordant and in the vilest taste, and yet w T e constantly 
meet with discrepancies in new country places, not a 
whit less barbarous. 
A common error, and we think a very decided one, in 
our new places, is the anxiety to have flowers and 
flowering shrubs while the place is still in the rough, 
and before we know where to put them with propriety. 
A very usual employment of new grounds immediately 
adjacent to the house, is the most injudicious and taste- 
less admixture of decapitated forest trees and dahlias, 
with vases, evergreens, roses, altheas, and the various 
common plants, indiscriminately put together, a few 
inches, or at most a few feet apart, in the coarse weedy 
grass, which is the best apology for lawn which could 
be got up in the time — exposed to the carelessness of 
workmen, and the depredation of roadside cattle. We 
have even seen avenues — and in places too, where 
otherwise there are evidences of good taste — planted 
wtih alternate rows of forest trees and dahlias, with an 
occasional rose tree or geranium. Nothing, we con- 
ceive, can be in w T orse taste than this ; for though 
nothing can well be prettier than a rose in a rose gar- 
den properly surrounded by the most reflned and orna- 
mental shrubs, like a jewel in an appropriate setting, 
yet can anything be more improper or discordant than 
the same rose in a stubble field, or what is quite as in- 
appropriate, in the rough and ill-kept grounds of a raw 
and unfinished place. Refinement must be associated 
with and surrounded by refinement, or it loses half its 
charm. We hear of and sometimes see a rough dia- 
mond ; but no one, we think, will pretend to say that 
