noble personages whom old Gerarde enumerates in his Herbal' as having either "loved to live in gardens," or written treatises on the subject. We know that Solomon "spoke of plants, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth out of the wall:"-though here the material surpassed the workmanship, for in all his wisdom he discoursed not so eloquently, nor in all his glory was he so richly arrayed, as "one lily of the field." The vegetable drug mithridate long handed down the name of the King of Pontus, its discoverer, "better knowne," says Gerarde, "by his soveraigne Mithridate, than by his sometime speaking two-and-twenty languages." "What should I say," continues the old herbalist, after having called in the authorities of Euax king of the Arabians, and Artemisia queen of Caria, "what should I say of those royal personages, Juba, Attalus, Climenus, Achilles, Cyrus, Masynissa, Semyramis, Dioclesian"-all skilled in "the excellent art of simpling?" We might easily swell the list by the addition of royal patrons of horticulture in modern times. Among our own sovereigns, Elizabeth, James I., and Charles II. are mentioned as having given their personal superintendence to the royal gardens, while a change in the style of laying out grounds is very generally attributed to the accession of William and Mary-though we doubt whether a horticultural genius would have met with any better or more fitting reception from the hero of the Boyne than did the great wit to whom he offered a cornetcy of dragoons. The gardens of Tzarsco-celo PATRONS OF GARDENING. 7. and of Peterhoff were severally the summer resorts of Catherine I. and Elizabeth of Russia, where the one amused herself with building a Chinese village, and the other by cooking her own dinner in the summer-house of Monplaisir. There are more thrilling associations connected with the Jardin Anglais of the Trianon at Versailles, where some rose-trees yet grow which were planted by Marie Antoinette; nor will an Englishman easily forget the grounds of Claremont, which yet cherish the memory and the taste of that truly British princess who delighted to superintend even the arrangement of the flowers in the cottage-garden. At the present moment great things are promised at Windsor, both in the ornamental and useful department; and we trust that the alterations now in progress, avowedly under the eye of royalty, will produce gardens as worthy of the sovereign and the nation, as is the palace to which they are attached. Little new is to be said upon the history of gardening. Horace Walpole and Daines Barrington have well-nigh exhausted the subject, and all later writers go over the same ground. Beginning with the Eden of our first parents, we have the old stories of the orchard of the Hesperides, and the dragon, and the golden fruit (now explained to be oranges) -the gardens of Adonis-the Happy Isles-the hanging terraces of Babylon-till, with a passing glance at those of Alcinous and Laertes, as described by Homer, we arrive at the Gardens of Epicurus and the Academe of Plato. Roman history brings up the rear with the villas of Cicero and Pliny, the fruits of Lucullus, the roses of Pæstum, and Cæsar's "Private arbours and new-planted orchards On this side Tiber." To how different a scene in each of these instances the term " garden" has been applied we have now no time to inquire; but we may perhaps be allowed, before entering upon the fresher and more inviting scene of the English parterre, to say one word in correction of an error common to all writers on the horticulture of the ancients. They would have us consider all classical gardens as little more than kitchen-gardens or orchards-to use the expression of Walpole, "a cabbage and a gooseberry-bush." This is a great mistake. The love of flowers is as clearly traceable in the poets of antiquity as in those of our own times, and their allusions to them plainly show that they were cultivated with the greatest care. Fruit-trees no doubt were mingled with their flowers, but in the formal, or indeed in any style, this might be made an additional beauty. The very order* indeed of their olive-groves had a protecting deity at Athens, and with such exactness did they set out the elms which supported their vines that Virgil compares them to the rank and file of a Roman legion. But the "fair-clustering"† narcissus and the " gold-gleaming" crocus were reckoned among the glories of Attica as much as the nightingale, and the olive, and the steed; and the violet ‡ Soph. Ed. Col. 705. + Ibid. 682. Aristoph. Equit. 1324. Acharn. 637. ANCIENT GARDENS-ROMAN-GREEK. 9 was as proud a device of the Ionic Athenians as the rose of England, or the lily of France. The Romans are even censured by their lyric poet* for allowing their fruitful olive-groves to give place to beds of violets, and myrtles, and all the "wilderness of sweets." The first rose of spring † and the "last rose of summer"‡ have been sung in Latin as well as English. Ovid's description of the Floralia will equal any account we can produce of our Mayday; nor has Milton himself more glowingly painted the flowery mead of Enna than has the author of the Fasti. Cicero § distinctly enumerates the cultivation of flowers among the delights of the country; and Virgil || assures us that, had he given us his Georgic on Horticulture, he would not have forgotten the narcissus or acanthus, the ivy, the myrtle, or the rose-gardens of Pæstum. The moral which Burns drew from his "mountain daisy" had been marked before both by Virgil T and Catullus; and indeed a glance at the Eclogues, the Georgics, or the Fasti, will show the same love of flowers in their authors which evidently animated the great comedian of Greece, where he describes the gentlemen of "merry old Athens " as "redolent of honeysuckle and holidays;"†† and which is so conspicuous in our own Shakspeare as to have led to some late * Hor. ii. xv. 5. Hor. Od. i. xxviii. 3. † Virg. Georg. iv. 134. ** "Nec vero segetibus solum, et pratis, et vineis, et arbustis res rusticæ lætæ sunt, sed etiam in hortis et pomariis; tum pecudum pastu, apium examinibus, florum omnium varietate.”—De Sen., c. 15. Georg. iv. 124. En. ix. 435. ** Catull. xi. †† σμίλακος ὄζων καὶ ἀπραγμοσύνης. Aristoph. Nub. 1007. ingenious- surmises that he was born and bred a gardener.* Addison amused himself by comparing the different styles of gardening with those of poetry"Your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages and cascades, are romancewriters;" while the gravel-pits in Kensington Gardens, then just laid out by London and Wise, were heroic verse. If our modern critics were to draw a similar comparison, we suppose our gardens would be divided into the Classical and the Romantic. The first would embrace the works of the Italian, Dutch, and French, the second those of the Chinese and English schools. The characteristics of the three symmetric styles are not easily to be distinguished, but from the climate and character of the nations, perhaps even more than from the actual examples existing in their respective countries, a division has *We may perhaps return to the subject of ancient gardens. Meanwhile, we answer to Daines Barrington's remark, that "he knew of no Greek or Latin word for nosegay,"-that the ancients wore their flowers on their head, not in their bosom; and there is surely mention enough about "σrépavot" and. " coronæ." But we need hardly wonder at such an oversight in an author who, noticing the passages on flowers in our early poets, makes no allusion to Shakspeare. To H. Walpole, who says, "their gardens are never mentioned as affording shade and shelter from the rage of the dog-star," we can now only quote and 66 Spissa ramis laurea fervidos -"platanum potantibus umbram;" and Hor. ii. xi. 13. The platanus was the newly introduced gardenwonder of the Augustan age. |