SOME WONDERFUL GARDENS. 
The first tiling man did when he was placed on this 
earth was to keep a garden. And although he proved 
an unfaithful gardener in this instance, it would seem 
that his taste for horticulture has always remained a 
prominent passion. Whether the products were objects 
of utility or beauty, he sought for the most perfect 
method of tilling the earth, and from the earliest times 
of civilization or national refinement gardening was a 
practiced art. The story of that first Eden seems to 
have haunted the imaginations of men, and legends of 
various forms have come down of that primeval home 
of the race. The Greek poets celebrated the gardens of 
the Hesperides, which they located near the Atlas 
Mountains in the Barbary States. In it were orchards 
of trees that bore golden apples, which were guarded by 
a sleepless dragon with a hundred heads. The garden 
was walled in with brazen gates, and was under the es¬ 
pecial protection of Juno, the queen of heaven. It was 
one of the twelve labors of Hercules to secure these 
golden apples, an exploit that he performed by putting 
the hundred-headed dragon to sleep. 
Almost as celebrated in Greek story were the gardens 
of the Phteacian prince Alcinous at Scheria, whose 
charms are related by Homer in book seventh of the 
Odyssey in some of his most exquisite hexameters- 
These gardens occupied about four aex-es of ground, and 
were fenced with a hedge or green enclosure. Every 
fruit and flower known to the Greeks bloomed and 
ripened in that favored retreat. To Ulysses, on his ar¬ 
rival at the palace of the Plueacian King, the gardens 
seemed like paradise. Two plenteous fountains irri¬ 
gated the grounds, and the poet glows rapturously over 
its tossing fruit-laden boughs and its summery, shady 
bowers. 
Among other famous Greek gardens were those of the 
Phrygian Prince Midas in Macedonia,celebrated for their 
Roses with a hundred leaves, which Xerxes visited upon 
his invasion of Greece; and those of the Ilissus at 
Athens, founded by Pisistratus 540 B.C., which were the 
first public gardens that we read of among the ancients. 
Perhaps the most wonderful of all the wonderful 
gardens of the world were the hanging gardens of Baby¬ 
lon, built by Nebuchadnezzar. He reigned six hundred 
years before our Christian era, and was the greatest 
monarch and builder of ins time. He erected grand 
public works at his capital which became wonders of 
the world, and ho indulged in some no less costly private 
expenditures. His wife, Queen Amyntis, was a Median 
princess, and sighed for her native mountains amid the 
flatness of the Babylonian plain, the greatest in the 
ancient world. To gratify her, Nebuchadnezzar con¬ 
structed the famous gardens, which were not “hanging 
gardens ” at all, but rather an elevated paradise. Arches 
were raised on arches in continued series until they 
overtopped the walls of Babylon, the height of two 
hundred cubits; and stairways led from terrace to ter¬ 
race. The whole structure of masonry was overlaid 
with soil sufficient to nourish the largest trees, which, 
by means of hydraulic engines, were supplied from the 
river with abundant moisture. In the midst of these 
groves stood the royal winter residence; for a retreat 
which, in other climates, would be most suitable for a 
summer habitation, was here reserved for those cooler 
months in which alone man can live in the open air. 
This first great work of landscape gardening, which 
history describes, comprised a charming variety of hills 
and forests, rivers, cascades and fountains, and was 
adorned with the loveliest flowers the East could pro¬ 
duce. 
The Persians laid out extensive tracts of land, called 
paradises, diversified with streams, groves and grottos, 
"and beautified with every object of art. They reduced 
gardening to a science which was the envy even of the 
Greeks. The gardens of the great satrap, Tisaphemes, 
at Sardis, excited the admiration of the Spartan Lysan- 
der, laid out with the most magnificent taste and adorned 
with all the plants and flowers of Orient lands. Mithri- 
dates, of Pontirs, copying from his Persian ancestors, 
exhibited a horticultural passion, and was himself an 
adept at gardening. Lucullus, the conqueror of Mithri- 
dates, carried some of the Pontine king’s ideas to Italy, 
ornamenting his own grounds with the fanciful estab¬ 
lishment of the Persian to such a degree that his friends, 
the Stoics, called him “Xerxes in a gown.” It is well 
to remember, perhaps, that it is to Lucullus that we owe 
the introduction of the Cherry tree into the lands of the 
West. 
The Chinese have, from a remote antiquity, exhibited 
a marvelous skill in the laying out of gardens and pleas¬ 
ure grounds. Chinese horticulture in many respects 
cannot be surpassed by that of the most civilized nation 
of to-day. The imperial gardens are said to be exquisite 
creations of the artist’s and the gardener’s art. Those 
of the Emperor Kien-Long, at Zhehol, present the most 
magnificent specimens of tire Chinese style to be found 
in the Empire. Zhehol is a small town in Tartary, and 
is the summer residence of the court. The palace 
and gardens are situated in a romantic valley, on the 
banks of a fine river, overhung by rugged mountains. 
T1 e grounds are exquisitely laid out, and adorned with 
as many as fifty handsome pavilions, magnificently 
furnished, each containing a state-room with a throne 
in it, and some of them having a large banqueting hall 
where entertainments are given on special occasions to 
the great mandarins of the court. Among the orna¬ 
ments of these beautiful pleasure-grounds are small, 
transparent lakes filled with gold and silver fishes, and 
a broad canal on which are several islands adorned with 
pagodas and summer-houses of various forms, sheltered 
by groves of trees and fragrant shrubs. All Chinese 
buildings of this description are highly decorated, and 
generally bear some resemblance to a tent, which is 
evidently the model from which the architecture of 
China was originally designed. The gilded pagodas 
and temples rising among the green trees, the flashing 
of fountains, and the flapping of countless sails on the 
canals combine to make this celestial paradise a garden 
of delight. 
A flavor of Oriental romance is connected with the 
gardens' of Shalimar, celebrated in Moore’s “Lalla 
