Such artists would have less reason, to grieve on that account
in this country. Indeed even in England, the source of uneasiness
alluded to, is now removed. "The deliberation with which trees grow,"
wrote Horace Walpole, in a letter to a friend, "is extremely
inconvenient to my natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous
an age when we are come to so little perfection in gardening. I am
persuaded that 150 years hence it will be as common to remove oaks 150
years old as it now is to plant tulip roots." The writer was not a bad
prophet. He has not yet been dead much more than half a century and his
expectations are already more than half realized. Shakespeare could not
have anticipated this triumph of art when he made Macbeth ask
Who can impress the forest? Bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?
The gardeners have at last discovered that the largest (though not
perhaps the _oldest_) trees can be removed from one place to another
with comparative facility and safety. Sir H. Stewart moved several
hundred lofty trees without the least injury to any of them. And if
broad and lofty trees can be transplanted in England, how much more
easily and securely might such a process be effected in the rainy season
in this country. In half a year a new garden might be made to look like
a garden of half a century. Or an old and ill-arranged plantation might
thus be speedily re-adjusted to the taste of the owner.
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