In the neighbourhood of Antwerp is a lawn with sheep-like the grey wethers of Salisbury Plain-of stone, and shepherd and dog of the same material to match. Generally, however, the scissors and the yew-tree make up the main furniture' of the garden; and there is something so venerable, and even classical,* about cones and pyramids, and peacocks of box and yew, that we should be loth to destroy a single specimen of the topiary art that was not in flagrant disconnection with the scene around it. of course adopted with the same enthusiasm and intelligence as they showed in taking up the democratic parts of our constitution. Ermenonville, the seat of Viscomte Girardin, was the first place of consequence laid out in the natural style, and a more complete specimen of French adaptation was never heard of. We have not space even to glance at half its charms; but some idea of the genius loci may be conveyed from the fact that a garden in ruins' was one of its lions. And it seems that the Viscomte kept a band of musicians continually moving about, now on water, However, the most striking and indisnow on land, to draw the attention of visi- pensable feature of a private garden in the tors to the right points of view at the right Dutch style is the lust-huis, or pleasuretime of the day; while Madame and her house, hundreds of which overlook every daughters, in a sweet mixture of the natu- public road and canal in Holland. Perched ral, the revolutionary, and the romantic, pro- on the angle of the high wall of the enclomenaded the grounds, dressed in brown sure, or flanking or bestriding the stagnant stuff, en amazones,' with black hats; and canalulet which bounds the garden, in all the young men wore 'habillements les plus the gaiety and cleanliness of fresh paint, simples et le plus propres à les faire confon- these little rooms form the resort, in sumdre avec les enfans des campagnards.'* One mer and autumn evenings, of the owners instance, more Frenchified and ridiculous and their families, who, according to sex still, was that of the 'Moulin Joli' of Wate- and age, indulge themselves with pipes and let. He was a writer of a system of gar- beer, tea and gossip, or in observing the dening on utilitarian principles; but, hav- passengers along the high road,-while ing erected divers temples and altars about these, in their turn, are amused with the his grounds, he felt himself bound, in con- amiable and pithy mottoes on the pavillions, sistency with his theory, to employ occa- which set forth the Pleasure and Ease,' sionally troops of sacrificers and worship-Friendship and Sociability,' &c. &c., of pers, to give his gimcrack pagodas and the family-party within. shrines the air of utility! In good keeping with his garden was the encomium of the Prince de Ligne. Allez-y, incrédules! Méditez sur les inscriptions que le gout y a dictées. Méditez avec le sage, soupirez avec l'amant, et bénissez Watelet.' The line of demarcation between the Dutch and French styles is perhaps more imaginary than real. The same exact symmetry everywhere prevails. There is a profusion of ornaments, only on a smaller scale, 'Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees,' with stagnant and muddy canals and ditches, purposely made for the bridge that is thrown over them; but they abound also in the pleasanter accompaniments of grassy banks and slopes, green terraces, caves, waterworks, banquetting-houses set on mounds, with a profusion of trellis-work and green paint furnished,' in the words of Evelyn, with whatever may render the place agree able, melancholy, and country-like, not forgetting a hedge of jets d'eau surrounding a parterre.' * Gaz. Lit. de l'Europe, quoted by Loudon, Encyc., p. 86. We have thought it necessary to give a slight sketch of the principal continental styles, before we entered upon the consideration of that which is universally recognized as appropriate to the English garden. In a former number of our Review a his tory of the changes that have passed over English gardens was given, in his usual happy manner, by Sir Walter Scott, which precludes the necessity of more than a passing reference to the same subject. London and Wise were among the earliest innovators on the old Dutch school in England, and received the high praise of Addison in the Spectator' for the introduction of a more natural manner in Kensington Gardens, then newly laid out. Bridgeman followed, laying the axe to the root of many a verdurous peacock and lion of Lincolngreen. Kent, the inventor of the Ha-ha, broke through the visible and formal boundary, and confounded the distinction between the garden and the park. Brown, of capability' memory, succeeded, with his round clumps, boundary belts, seminatural rivers, extensive lakes, broad green *See Pliny and Martial-we may say passim. drives, with the everlasting portico summerhouse at the end. Castle Howard, Blenheim, and Stowe, were the great achievements of these times; while the bard of the Leasowes was creating his sentimental farm, rearing,' says D'Israeli, hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters,' 'And having shown them where to stray, Threw little pebbles in their way;' displaying--according to the English rhymes of a noble foreigner who raised a 'plain stone' to the memory of Shenstone' a mind natural,' in laying out 'Arcadian greens rural.* Whateley's book completed the revolution. It was instantly translated into French, the Anglomanie' being then at its height; and though the clipped pyramids and hedges did not fall so recklessly as in England, yet no place of any pretension was considered perfect without the addition of its jardin Anglais.'t The natural style was now for some time, in writings and practice, completely triumphant. At length came out 'Price on the Picturesque,' who once more drew the distinction between the parterre and the forest, in opposition to the straggling, scrambling style, which Whateley called combining the excellences of the garden and the park.' From the times of Socrates and Epicurus to those of Wesley, Simeon, and Pusey, the same story is to be told; and if theology and philosophy could not escape, how should poor gardening expect to go free? * Dr. Johnson, who, we think, used to boast either that he did or did not (and it is much the same) know a cabbage from a cabbage-rose, has a passage in his 'Life of Shenstone' so perfectly Johnsonian that we must transcribe it: Now was excited his delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of rural elegance; he began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful-a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view-to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden-demand any great powers of the mind, I will not inquire: perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason. But it must at least be confessed that to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement, and some praise must be allowed by the most scrupulous observer to him who does best what multitudes are contending to do well.' + Horace Walpole's description of M. Boutin's garden. It is the natural effect of the bold enunciation of a broad principle, that it will oftener be strained to cover extreme cases than be applied to the general bearing of the subject. Withdraw the pure and intelligent mind that first directed its application, and hundreds of professed disciples and petty imitators spring up, whose optics are sharpsighted enough to see the faults condemned in the old system, though their comprehension is too limited to embrace the whole range of truth and beauty in the new; with just so much knowledge as to call up a maxim or phrase for the purpose of distorting it, and passing it on the world as the ipse dixit of the master, though without intellect enough to perceive the time, the measure, or the place, which alone make its application desirable. Wilkes was at much trouble to assure George III. that he was not a Wilkite; and if many an ordinary man has need at times to exclaim, Preserve me from my friends,' all great ones have much more reason to cry out, Defend me from my disciples.' Perhaps all this is a little too grandiloquent for our humble subject; but if a marked example of discipular ultraism and perversion were wanting, no stronger one could be found than that supplied by the followers of Price. And if we have made more of this matter than it deserves, we care not, for our great object is to impress upon our readers that this unfortunate word picturesque' has been the ruin of our gardens. Price himself never dreamt of applying it, in its present usage, to the plot of ground immediately surrounding the house. His own words are all along in favour of a formal and artificial character there, in keeping with the mansion itself; and as Sir Walter Scott remarks, he expresses in a tone of exquisite feeling his regret at his own destruction of a garden on the old system. He might, indeed, have used the term with reference to those splendid terraces, -arcades, and balconies of Italy with which we are familiar in the architectural pictures of Panini; but he would have shrunk with horror to have his theory applied to justify the substitution of tadpole, and leech, and comma, and sausage figures for the trim gardens of symmetrical forms, even though he might see in them (as Addison says) 'the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.' scenery, as completely distinct from 'gar- to build stately sooner than to garden finedening' as the things themselves are. Since the publication of Price's book no writer has appeared advocating any particular theory or system of gardening. Principles and practice have become of a like composite order, and, in general it has been left to the gardener to adopt at his own pleasure, the stucco, and cast-iron and wire ornaments, that fashion has from time to time produced, to suit the last importations or the favourite flower of the season. The early part of the nineteenth century presents a great coolness in the garden mania with which the eighteenth was so possessed; and it was hardly till after the peace that public attention again took this direction. We presume that it will only be in the philosophical fashion of the day to say that this was a natural reaction of the public mind, after the turmoil of a foreign war, to fall back upon the more peaceful occupations of home. The institution of the Horticultural Society of London, however, took place a little carlier, and it no doubt gave both a stimulus and a stability to the growing taste of the nation. ly. To attempt, therefore, to disguise Though it may be questioned whether a wholly its artificial character is as great folpicture should be the ultimate test of the ly as if men were to make their houses retaste in laying out gardens and grounds, semble as much as possible the rudeness of a Price, even on this view, offers some very natural cavern. So much mawkish sentiingenious arguments in defence not only of mentality had been talked about the natural Italian but even of the old English gar- style, that even Price himself dared not asden; and his feelings now would evidently sert that a garden must be avowedly arhave led him still further to adopt the for- tificial. And though now it seems nothing mal system, had his theory not stood a strange to hazard such a remark, yet its little in the way. He seems to recognize a truth still requires to be brought more boldthreefold division of the domain-the ar-ly and closely home to us before we can exchitectural terrace, and flower-garden in pect to see our gardens what they ought to direct connection with the house, where he be. admits the formal style; the shrubbery or pleasure-ground, a transition between the flowers and the trees, which he would hand over to the natural style' of Brown and his school; and, thirdly, the park, which he considers the proper domain of his own system. This is a distinction which it would be well for every proprietor to keep in view, not for the sake of a monotonous ad herence to its divisions in every case, but in order to remember that the tree, the shrub, and the flower, though they may be occasionally mingled with effect, yet require a separate treatment, and the application of distinct principles, where they are to be exhibited each in its full perfection. Our present subject of complaint is the encroachments which the natural and picturesque styles have made upon the regular flower-garden. Manufacturers of bye-lanes and lightning-struck cottages are all very well in their own department, but that must not be in the vicinity of the house. We suppose that even Whateley himself would admit that the steps and threshold of the door must be symmetrical, and would pro- It may be amusing to run over some few bably allow a straight pathway more appro- statistics of the progress of horticulture priate, and even more natural than a wind- since that time. It is now only thirty-three ing one, leading directly to the door of the years since the foundation of the Lonhouse. Once get a single straight line, don Society, the first comprehensive institueven the outline of the building itself, and tion of its kind: there are now in Great Briit then becomes merely a matter of situation, tain at least 200 provincial societies, foundor convenience, or taste, how far the straight ed more or less upon its model. We find lines and right angles shall be extended; merely in the Gardener's Chronicle' for and though nature must needs be removed last year notices of the exhibitions of 120 a few paces further into her own proper re- different societies. Everything else connecttreat, yet simplicity may still remain in re-ed with gardening has increased in the like gular and symmetrical forms, as much as in proportion. There were at that time not undulations and irregularities and mole- more than two botanical, and those stricthills under the very windows of the draw-ly scientific, periodical works; there are ing-room. Nothing, as Scott has remark- now at least twenty monthly publications, ed, is more completely the child of art than a garden. It is, indeed, in our modern sense of the term, one of the last refinements of civilized life. A man shall ever see,' says Lord Bacon, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come each devoted to some branch or other of botany or horticulture; and, what may perhaps still more surprise those of our readers who live apart from the influence of the gardening world, there are or were very lately, published every week three newspapers professedly monopolized by horticultural preserving-the Viceroy'-was sold for subjects. Even during the last year, two 4203 florins; and for another, called 'Semnew societies have sprung up in the me- per Augustus,' there were offered 4600 tropolis-the London Floricultural and the florins, a new carriage, a pair of grey horsRoyal Botanic, each taking a line of its es, and a complete set of harness!* own, distinct, though not antagonistically so, from that of any previously formed institution and both, we believe, prospering, and likely to prosper. Many of our readers, who have heard of a fashionable, and a scientific, and a sporting, and (stranger name still!) a religious WORLD; may perhaps be in unhappy ignorance of the floricultural one. But such indeed there is, with its own leaders, language, laws, exclusiveness-aye, even its party bitterness, and personal animosi ties. And shameful indeed it is that such pure and simple objects should be the source of the unseemly quarrels and bickerings which are too often obtruded into floricultural publications; that men should extract envy and malice and all uncharitableness' out of the purest of all human pleasures'- ་ Even as those bees of Trebizond, Which from the sunniest hours that glad With their pure smile the garden round Draw venom forth that drives men mad!' Lallah Roohk. The division of labour, both in the horticultural and floricultural world, is carried to an extent that the uninitiated little dream of. There are not only express exhibitions for each particular plant that has been adopted into the family of florist's flowers'- as for the tulip, dahlia, pink, and heartsease-but there are actually several existing cucumber clubs' and 'celery societies;' and, within a very short period, four or five treatises have been published on the culture of the cucumber alone. Then we must speak of the flake' of the carnation—the edging' of the picotee-the 'crown' and the lacing' of the pink-the 'feather and flame' of the tulipthe eye and depth' of the dahlia-the 'tube, the truss, and the paste' of the auricula-and the 'pencil' and 'blotch' of the pansy. Besides these peculiar pets of the fancy, there are the old-fashioned polyanthus, the ranunculus, the geranium, the calceolaria, the crysanthemum, and the hyacinth, which are also under the especial patronage of the florists; and, lately, the iris, the gladiolus, the fuchsia, and the verbena, may be considered as added to the list. The tulipomania of Holland is well known it was at its height in the year 1637, when one bulb-its name is worth : The florimania, as it has been calledwe should rather say 'anthomania'--has never reached so ridiculous a height in England, nor, with all our love for flowers, is it likely to do so, though there are staid men of business among us who would doubtless be amazed at the sums of money even now occasionally lavished on a single plant. A noble Duke, munificent in his patronage of horticulture, as in everything else, and who-though till quite lately, we believe, ignorant of the subject-now understands it as thoroughly as he appreciates it, is said to have given one hundred guineas for a single specimen of an orchideous plant; and we know of another peer, not quite so wise in this or perhaps other matters, who, seeing a clump of the rich and gorgeous double-flowering gorse, instantly gave his gardener an order for fifty pounds' worth of it! Before we have done with the florists and botanists we must say one word about their nomenclatures. As long as the extreme vulgarity of the one and the extreme pedantry of the other continue, they must rest assured that they will scare the majority of this fastidious and busy world from taking any great interest in their pursuits. Though a rose by any other name will smell as sweet,' there is certainly enough to prejudice the most devoted lover of flowers against one that comes recommended by some such designation as Jim Crow,' or Metropolitan purple,' or 'King Boy,' or Yellow Perfection.' When indeed calceolarias and pansies increase to 2000' named varieties,' there must of course be some difficulty in finding out an appropriate title for every new upstart; but in this case the evil lies deeper than the mere name: it consists in puffing and palming off such seedlings at all, half of which are either such counterparts of older flowers, that nothing but the most microscopic examination would detect a difference, or else so utterly worthless as to be fit only to be thrown away. This is an increasing evil; and if anything gives a check to the present growing taste for choice flowers, it *At the sale of Mr. Clarke's tulips at Croydon, in the year 1836, 1007. was given for a single bulb, 'Fanny Kemble;' and from 51. to 107. is no uncomWe see mon price for the new and choice sorts. lias, the first year of their coming out,' at the like also frequent advertisements of geraniums and dahprice. will arise from the dishonesty and trickery | the specific titles, as Passiflora Middletoof the trade itself. Meanwhile, let there be at least some propriety in the names given. We cannot quite agree with Mr. Loudon, who seems to approve of such names as Claremontnuptials primrose' and Afflicted-queen carnation! though they do point to the years 1816 and 1821 as the dates of their respective appearances; neither will we aver that Linnæus was not something too fanciful in naming his Andromeda,* and in calling a genus Bauhinia, from two illustrious brothers of the name of Bauhin, because it has a double leaf; but surely there is marked character enough about every plant to give it some simple English name, without drawing either upon living characters or dead languages. It is hard work, as even Miss Mitford has found it, to make the maurandias, and alstræmerias, and eschscholtzias-the commonest flowers of our modern gardens-look passable even in prose. They are sad dead letters in the glowing_description of a bright scene in June. But what are these to the pollopostemonopetalæ and eleutheromacrostemones of Wachendorf, with such daily additions as the native name of iztactepotzacuxochtil icohueyo, or the more classical ponderosity of Erisymum Peroffskyanum -like the verbum Græcum, Spermagoraiolekitholakanopolides, As to poetry attempting to immortalize a modern bouquet, it is utterly hopeless; and if our cultivators expect to have their new varieties handed down to posterity, they must return to such musical sounds as bu glosse, and eglantine, and primrose, before bards will adopt their pets into immortal song. We perceive some attempt made lately in Paxton's Magazine and the better gardening journals to render the names somewhat more intelligible by Englishing The following is his reason for thus naming this delicate shrub, one of those bog-plants not half so much cultivated as it deserves to be:- As I contemplated it, I could not help thinking of Andromeda, as described by the poets-a virgin of most exquisite beauty and unrivalled charms. The plant is always fixed in some turfy hillock in the midst of the swamps, as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet, as the fresh water does the root of the plant. As the distressed virgin cast down her blushing face through excessive affliction, so does the rosy-coloured flower hang its head, growing paler and paler till it withers away. At length comes Perseus, in the shape of summer, dries up the surrounding waters and destroys the monsters, rendering the damsel a fruitful mother, who then carries her head erect. Tour in Lapland, June 12th. niana-Middleton's Passion-flower, and the like; but this is not enough: the combination of a little observation and taste would soon coin such names as our plainer sires' gave in 'larkspur,' and 'honeysuckle,' and bindweed,' or even in ladies'-smocks,' and ragged-robin,' and love-lies-bleeding.' As names run at present, the ordinary amateur is obliged to give up the whole matter in despair, and rest satisfied with the awful false quantities which his gardener is pleased to inflict upon him, who, for his own part, wastes hours and hours over names that convey to him no information, but only serve to puff him up with a false notion of his acquirement, when he finds himself the sole possessor of this useless stock of Aristophanic compounds and insufferable misnomers.' Crabbe, whom nothing was too minute to escape, has admirably ridiculed this botanical pedantry : High-sounding words our worthy gardener gets, Scarce plants, fair herbs, and curious flowers proceed; Where cuckoo-pints and dandelions sprung, To make confusion worse confounded, our botanists are not satisfied with their far-fetched names; they must ever be ignorance in the world of flowers to call Thus it is a mark of changing them too. our old friend geranium otherwise than Pelargonium; the Glycine (G. sinensis) — the well known specimen of which at the 9000 of its beautiful, lilac, laburnum-like Chiswick Gardens produced more than racemes from a single stem-is now to be called Wistaria: the new Californian annual Enothera is already Godetia; while the pretty little red Hemimeris, once Celsia, is now, its third designation, an Alonsoa; and our list is by no means exhausted.* a There is a curious perversion of name in the tuberose, which has nothing to do with 'tubes' or 'roses,' but is the corruption of its specific name, Polianthes tuberosa, simply signifying tuberous: so Jerusalem artichoke has nothing to do with the hill of Sion, but is vulgarized from the Italian Girosole, sun-flower, of which it is a species; so Mayduke cherry, from Medoc; and 'grass' from asparagus. Gilliflower is probably July-flower, but it would take an essay to discuss which is the true gilliflower of our greatgreat-grandmothers. |
