Too
many trees and too much embellishment of a small garden make it look
still smaller, and even on a large piece of ground they produce confused
and disagreeable effects and indicate an absence of all true judgment.
This practice of over-filling a garden is an instance of bad taste,
analogous to that which is so conspicuously characteristic of our own
countrymen in India with respect to their apartments, which look more
like an upholsterer's show-rooms or splendid ornament-shops than
drawing-rooms or parlours. There is scarcely space enough to turn in
them without fracturing some frail and costly bauble. Where a garden is
over-planted the whole place is darkened, the ground is green and slimy,
the grass thin, sickly and straggling, and the trees and shrubs
deficient in freshness and vigor.
Not only should the native gentry avoid having their flower-borders too
thickly filled,--they should take care also that they are not too broad.
We ought not to be obliged to leave the regular path and go across the
soft earth of the bed to obtain a sight of a particular shrub or flower.
Close and entangled foliage keeps the ground too damp, obstructs
wholesome air, and harbours snakes and a great variety of other noxious
reptiles. Similar objections suggest the propriety of having no shrubs
or flowers or even a grass-plot immediately under the windows and about
the doors of the house.
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