diameter" which he could show in his "poor gardens at any time of the year, glitt'ring with its arm'd and vernish'd leaves-the taller standards, at orderly distances, blushing with their natural corall”

that mocked at "the rudest assaults of the weather, the beasts, or hedge-breaker "—even this is vanished without a solitary sucker to show where it once stood. Proof it long was against the wind and "weather," nay, against time itself, but not against the autocratic pleasure of a barbarian Czar. The "beast" and the "hedge-breaker" were united in the person of Peter the Great, whose great pleasure, when studying at Deptford, was to be driven in a wheelbarrow, or drive one himself, through this very hedge, which its planter deemed impregnable! If he had ever heard, which he probably had not, of Evelyn's boast, he might have thus loved to illustrate the triumph of despotic will and brute force over the most amiable and simple affections; but at any rate the history of this hedge affords a curious instance not only of the change of gardening taste, but of the mutability and strangeness of all earthly things.

No associations are stronger than those connected with a garden. It is the first pride of an emigrant settled on some distant shore to have a little garden as like as he can make it to the one he left at home. A pot of violets or mignionette is one of the highest luxuries to an Anglo-Indian. In the bold and picturesque scenery of Batavia, the Dutch can, from feeling, no more dispense with their little moats

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round their houses than they could, from necessity, in the flat swamps of their native land. Sir John Hobhouse discovered an Englishman's residence on the shore of the Hellespont by the character of his shrubs and flowers. Louis XVIII. on his restoration to France made in the park of Versailles the facsimile of the garden at Hartwell; and there was no more amiable trait in the life of that accomplished prince. Napoleon used to say that he should know his father's garden in Corsica blindfold by the smell of the earth; and the hanging gardens of Babylon are said to have been raised by the Median queen of Nebuchadnezzar on the flat and naked plains of her adopted country, to remind her of the hills and woods of her childhood.

Why should we speak of the plane-trees of Plato -Shakspere's mulberry-tree-Pope's willow-Byron's elm? Why describe Cicero at his Tusculum -Evelyn at Wooton-Pitt at Holcot-Walpole at Houghton-Grenville at Dropmore? Why dwell on Bacon's "little tufts of thyme," or Condé's pinks, or Fox's geraniums? There is a spirit in the garden as well as in the wood, and "the lilies of the field" supply food for the imagination as well as materials for sermons. "Talke of perfect happiness or pleasure," says old Gerarde to the "courteous and well-willing reader," from his "house in Holborn, within the suburbs of London "and what place was so fit for that as the garden-place wherein Adam was set to be the herbalist? Whither did the poets hunt for their sincere delights but into the gardens of Alcinous, of

Adonis, and the orchards of the Hesperides? Where did they dream that heaven should be but in the pleasant garden of Elysium? Whither doe all men walke for their honest recreation but thither where the earth hath most beneficially painted her face with flourishing colours? And what season of the yeare more longed for than the spring, whose gentle breath enticeth forth the kindly sweets, and makes them yield their fragrant smells?"

And what country, we may add, so suited, and climate so attempered, to yield the full enjoyment of the pleasures and blessings of a garden, as our own? Everybody knows the remark of Charles II., first promulgated by Sir W. Temple, "that there were more days in the year in which one could enjoy oneself in the open air in England than in any other portion of the known world." This, which contains so complete an answer to the weather-grumblers of our island, bears also along with it a most encouraging truth to those "who love to live in gardens.' There is no country that offers the like advantages to horticulture. Perhaps there is not one plant in the wide world wholly incapable of being cultivated in England. The mosses and lichens dragged from under the snows of Iceland, and the tenderest creepers of the tropical jungles, are alike subject to the art of the British gardener. Artificial heat and cold, by the due application of steam and manure, sun and shade, hot and cold water, and even icemattings, flues in every variety of pit, frame, conservative wall, conservatory, greenhouse, hothouse,

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and stove, seem to have realised every degree of temperature from Kamskatka to Sincapore. But apart from artificial means, the natural mildness of our sky is most favourable to plants brought from countries of either extreme of temperature; and, as their habits are better known and attended to, not a year passes without acclimatising many heretofore deemed too tender for the open air. Gardeners are reasonably cautious in not exposing at once a newlyintroduced exotic; and thus we know that when Parkinson wrote, in 1629, the larch, and the laurel -then called bay-cherry-were still protected in winter. We are now daily adding to the list of our hardy plants; hydrangeas, the tree-peony, fuchsias, salvias, altromærias, and Cape-bulbs, are now found, with little or no protection, to stand our midEngland winters.

Then we alone have in perfection the three main elements of gardening, flowers apart, in our lawns, our gravel, and our evergreens. It is the greatest stretch of foreign luxury to emulate these. The lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from the Kensington gravel-pits. It is not probably generally known that among our exportations are every year a large quantity of evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade. This may seem the more

remarkable to those who fancy that, from the superiority of foreign climates, any English tree would bear a continental winter; but the bare appearance of the French gardens, mostly composed as they are of deciduous trees, would soon convince them of the contrary. It is not the severity or length of our December nights that generally destroys our more tender exotic plants, but it is the late frosts of April and May, those "nipping frosts," which, coming on after the plant has enjoyed warmth enough to set the sap in action, freeze its life-blood to the heart's core, and cause it to wither and die. The late winter of 1837-8 proved this fact distinctly, which had hardly been sufficiently remarked before. That year, which cut down even our cypresses and chinaroses, and from which our gorse-fields have hardly yet recovered, while it injured nearly every plant and tree on south walls and in sheltered borders, and in all forward situations, spared the tenderest kinds on north walls and exposed places; and in Scotland the destruction was hardly felt at all. It was the backwardness of their growing state that saved these plants; and the knowledge of this fact has already been brought to bear in several recent experiments. The double yellow rose, for instance, one of the most delicate of its class, is now flowered with great success in a northern exposition. It has led men also to study the hybernation of plants—perhaps the most important research in which horticulturists have of late engaged; and it has been ascertained that this state of winter-rest is a most important element in