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This has in all cases disappeared, as population has increased; and groves, fragments of wild-wood, small groups, and single trees have taken its place. Great Britain, once renowned for its extensive woods, now exhibits only smaller assemblages, chiefly of an artificial character, which are more interesting to the landscape-gardener than to the lover of Nature's primitive charms.
Tom Easterfield walked through the grounds and the gardens and out on the lawn, and looked down over the tops of the trees upon the river which sparkled far below, and he said to his wife that if she would let him do it he would send a landscape-gardener, with a great company of Italians, and they would make the place a perfect paradise in about five days.
Breynton had a great fancy for working over his trees and flowers, and, if he had not been a publisher and bookseller, might have made a very successful landscape-gardener. Poor health had driven him out of the professions, and the tastes of a scholar drove him away from out-door life; he had compromised the matter by that book-store down opposite the post-office.
Instead of striking across the natural lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the hollow, skirts the precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious landscape-gardener, it seeks the most convenient course, never doubting that grace will follow.
A wide gap through miles of woods had opened this distant view, and showed more, perhaps, than all the labors of the architect and the landscape-gardener the large style of the early Dudleys. The great stone-chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from which all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow.
About the time the trees begin to be worth having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies of old age. However, as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush into matrimony.
Meanwhile, the taskmaster, having issued commands to his black subordinates, felt justified in neglecting his own duties, in a dignified way, by seeking a shady retreat in which he lingered contemplating the charms of Nature and the pleasing results of his own skill as a landscape-gardener.
A skilful painter hardly does more for his blank sheet of canvas than the landscape-gardener, the planter, the arranges of trees, has done for the monotonous surface of Blenheim, making the most of every undulation, flinging down a hillock, a big lump of earth out of a giant's hand, wherever it was needed, putting in beauty as often as there was a niche for it, opening vistas to every point that deserved to be seen, and throwing a veil of impenetrable foliage around what ought to be hidden; and then, to be sure, the lapse of a century has softened the harsh outline of man's labors, and has given the place back to Nature again with the addition of what consummate science could achieve.
But beyond wood-craft, I could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong agricultural inclination; nor do I think that the old gentleman had much eye for the picturesque; no landscape-gardener of any reputation would have decided upon such a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford: the spot is low; the views are not extended or varied; the very trees are all of Scott's planting: but the master loved the murmur of the Tweed, loved the nearness of Melrose, and in every old bit of sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited horizon.
Enormous cost had been incurred in the planting of rare evergreens; full-grown trees had been transplanted wholesale from a distance, and still wore in many cases a sickly and invalided air; and elaborate contrasts in dark and light foliage had been arranged by the landscape-gardener employed. Dark plantations had a light border light plantations a dark one.
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