LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
135 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
LETTER TEN. 
Dear Sir, —In my two or three preceding letters, I have engaged 
your attention with some details of the kitchen garden ; its disposition, 
together with some account of the routine of business pursued in it; 
all circumstances which, though constituting the main, business of the 
gardener, ought not to be unknown to the general designer of a place 
like this. An ostensible connection should bind every the smallest part 
with every other part, so that the useful should be so intimately 
blended with embellishment that all should conspire to form a har¬ 
monious whole. 
That this has been steadily kept in view by the original designer of 
Fairfax Hall, I hope you begin to perceive from what I have already 
written ; and trust that this will be still farther evident when you 
learn what remains to be related. 
I have now to give you, first, a general view of the park, and the 
manner in which it has been improved—that is, changed from its 
ancient agricultural face, to a rich and extensive expanse of lawn, orna¬ 
mented by groves of stately trees, valuable woods, and coppice. An 
inconsiderable streamlet, formerly occupying a straight ditch under a 
hedge, is now expanded into a beautiful lake containing several 
acres, studded with three little islets, and occupying the lowest dip 
of a valley to the westward of the house. The hedges which chequered 
the opposite banks and gently swelling knolls of the surface into squares, 
more or less regular, have disappeared; and the general face of the 
park is at once interestingly undulating, and beautifully smooth and 
verdant. 
I have already stated that the higher parts of the brows and their 
sides, which slope towards the house, are generally planted; and the 
winding dips between are only partially furnished with groups, or 
single trees, but without hiding their windings, or screening their 
actual depth or extent. Crowning the knolls with trees adds to their 
elevation, and, moreover, gives greater apparent depth to the little 
valleys between. The tameness of groups, or open groves of trees, 
standing on smooth turf, is often complained of by people of real taste 
as too prevalent in English parks; and, indeed, has been, from an 
improper love of smoothness admitted as a kind of principle in modern 
landscape gardening. Hence the opprobrious names of f ‘ levellers and 
shavers bestowed so unsparingly on the Brownists. To obviate this 
