IN one respect there is little difference of opinion about a garden-that it is a good thing to have and a pleasant thing to use and enjoy, even temporarily and briefly. But if we go a step further, and look at the various modes of use and enjoyment-the forms, purposes, projects, reflections, and speculations of which gardens have been made the subject we find a wondrous amount of diversity. Gardens, in the first place, ought to furnish only pure delights. "God Almighty," says Lord Bacon, "first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which buildings and palaces are but gross handyworks." And yet gardens of old were systematically made scenes of voluptuousness and indecency under the sanction of religious rites. Their tutelary deity was in outward form the most disgusting of the heathen Pantheon. The emblems then used to typify the reproductive powers of nature were indeed gross and sensual. We may not uncharitably believe their alleged hidden. meaning to have been the shallowest of excuses for the raising of vile ideas. Gardens, again, should be gay-and Watteau has appropriately pictured them as saloons and ball-rooms-thus carrying out the idea of a full-dress promenade, in which the French of the old régime delighted. But Hervey's "Reflections on a Flower Garden," though well-meant, are so dull and doleful that the reader suspects he has taken up the "Meditations among the Tombs." What would become of the earth-he asks, as a cheering topic-if the sun were gone? "Were that radiant orb extinguished, a tremendous gloom would ensue, and horror insupportable." Ordinary ladies and gentlemen would not see much analogy between an avaricious curmudgeon and an unopened blossom. Hervey, however, is more perspicacious:

"On every side I espy budding flowers. As yet they are like bales of superfine cloth from the

packer's warehouse. Each is wrapt within a strong inclosure, and its contents are tied together by the firmest bandages; so that all their beauties lie concealed, und their sweets are locked up. Just such is the niggardly wretch whose aims are all turned inward, and meanly terminate upon himself."

To the laborious Nehemiah Grew, M.D. and F.R.S., his garden was a school of anatomy and a dissecting room, wherein he endeavored to trace the secret processes of vegetation; while the respectable Gerarde took a wider as well as a more prepossessing view :—

"For if delight may provoke men's labor, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with orient pearles and garnished with great diuersitie of rare and costly jewels? .. Giue me leaue onely to tell you that God of his infinite goodnesse and bounty hath, by the medium of Plants, bestowed almost all food, clothing, and medicine vpon man.”

With such recorded examples (which we could multiply ad libitum) people will plead for the indulgence of their respective horticultural whimsies; nor would we deny the claim;-but if the right of private judgment is allowed to others, we hope it will be tolerantly extended to ourselves. Now the leading idea at the present moment is, that there must be made, somehow and somewhere-and there soon will be made, else the public will fret itself to death-a vast covered garden, in which we are to have we know not what, in we know not what way exactly. Something of the kind is inevitable. Smithfield is to be a Ward's Case of several acres, where cryptogamic students will be able to extend their knowledge of moulds and mycelium; the Crystal Palace-whether kept where it is or re-erected elsewhere-is to be a conservatory containing ponds blooming with Victoria regia, (the singular number would be unseen in such a space,) and yet remain cool and dry; or Battersea fields, when not under water, are to bear the

nes of Australia at the proper season migrate to the pine-woods for the sole purpose of collecting them as an article of food: so that unless we, civilized, cool philosophers, as is probable, exterminate the natives, they may in their barbarous ardor exterminate the tree. It is, no doubt, well worth the saving, being indeed one of the highest aristocracy of the vegetable kingdom; but, unfortunately, it is tender here. Attempts are made to keep it protected and trained against a wall like a peach tree-a curious situation for any Conifer to find itself in. The beautiful Cryptomeria Japonica, not hardy in Scotland, is hardy at Kew. Several other noble trees, however, as the Sophora Japonica, make this distinction between the north and south sides of the Border.

But instead of the coniferous amateur, we will suppose a small mixed party started in quest of any botanical or horticultural marvels that may seem worth staring at. Such visitors will probably, on first entering, follow the crowd, and make for the Architectural Conservatory. It will gratify the curiosity of many to know that three greenhouses, exactly alike, were erected at Buckingham Palace, from designs by Sir Jeffrey Wyattville; and that in 1836 William IV. had one of the three removed bodily to this place. The second has been converted into a Chapel Royal--and the third is still a conservatory at the Palace; so that her Majesty's subjects here behold the exact counterpart of the building which fulfils the same office in the private grounds of royalty. In this they will find an extremely rich collection of bottle-brush-flowered, zigzag-leaved, graytinted, odd-looking things, to most eyes rather strange than beautiful, notwithstanding that one of them is named Banksia speciosa. They are the "Botany Bays" of old-fashioned gardeners, but are more in the shrub and tree line than that of flowering pot plants. Banksia Solandri will remind them to turn to their Cook's Voyages when they get home, to read how poor Dr. Solander got up a mountain and was heartily glad to get down again. Else there is little to fix the attention of our party. Whether Dry andra, Grevillea, Hakea, or the other Proteaceæ, all may take part in the same glee

"It was a shrub of orders gray Stretched forth to show his leaves."

Thence, the main path will be followed to the cloak-room, where the ladies may leave their shawls or other cumbrous what-nots.

In descending the steps, notice the two hardy palms, Chamaerops excelsa, on each side, in large china vases. The mass of ivy at the back of the cloak-room is worth looking at; which reminds us to note here the pretty and uncommon cut-leaved ivy in front of the Museum.

Reascending the steps, a noble walk is before us, terminated by the smoke-shaft of the great Palm House, in the guise of an Italian Campanile. It stands nearly five hundred feet from the structure to which it is accessory. The smoke from the furnaces is conveyed by flues to a shaft within the tower, and by the use of coke for fuel little is perceptible. Hidden by shrubs, not far from the base of the tower, is a coal-yard, and also the entrance of the tunnel, which, by means of a tram-way, conveys fuel, and brings back ashes, &c., from the furnaces. The tunnel is about eight feet high, convenient to walk in, and lighted and ventilated by shafts from above, many of whose grated openings are concealed in flower-beds. Of course, the public are not indiscriminately admitted to these subterranean wonders. An understanding must first be had with the well-behaved gnomes who

"Here, in a grotto shelter'd close from air, And screen'd in shades from day's detested glare,"

give the first impulse to the machinery which elaborates the beautiful vegetation overhead.

Water is the vehicle to the grand Palmstove of whatever philosophers may decide heat to be, whether substance or accident, essence or effect. Twelve mighty boilers, six belonging to one half, six to another, are the hearts propelling the "thermidor" fluid through pipes, which, by the circulation passing within them, represent rudely a venous and arterial system. This battery has been wisely calculated with a prospect to extreme cases. During the three years the Palm-house has been in action it has never been found necessary to light more than eleven furnaces. In July and August four fires are sufficient to keep things going. There always ought to be a reserved power in establishments whose very existence depends on the maintenance of a given temperature; otherwise, a frost might occur to destroy the whole invaluable contents of this Palm-house in a single night. We shall never forget the story told us by a lighthouse-keeper, on a coast much exposed to north winds, of the awful anxiety lest the

oil should congeal, and the lamps go out, at a time when a gale, we know not how many degrees below freezing point, must drive every unwarned vessel on a lee shore.

But we caught sight of the smoke-tower on leaving the cloak-room, and have not yet advanced far along the vista. On our right are some beautiful large Conifers in tubs, out for their summer airing. They are tender; the more's the pity-for the Dacrydium cupressinum, from New Zealand, is perhaps the most unmistakably weeping and disconsolately mournful tree in the world; and no one can look at the Norfolk Island Pine without being angry with it, that so much beauty should be combined with so much effeminacy. Perhaps we blame and punish other weaknesses and unrobust idiosyncrasies, with the same degree of reason and justice as we should exercise in scolding the delicate Araucaria excelsa because it is not gifted with the obstinate temper of a Norway fir. On the left is the Great Orangery, one of Sir William Chambers's solid magnificences, now empty of its inmates, but soon to become the winter garden of those High Tendernesses for whose infirmities we have been offering a sentence in apology. As we proceed, Mr. Nesfield spreads on each side of us bright pieces of carpet, each tinted with one color. The materials of which this living tapestry is woven are, Calceolarias-C. amplexicaulis, a clear canary yellow; Pelargoniums-pinkflowered, ivy-leaved, and "Frogmore," of a scarlet bright enough to blind weak-eyed mortals; blue Campanula Carpathica; gray (when considered in toto) Alyssum variegatum; Ageratum Mexicanum, of clear lavender; the dingy blue (as seen in mass) Lobelia Erinus, var. compacta; fringed with black and yellow, the Sanvitalia procumbens; and Verbenas that bid defiance to the tinctorial art. There stands the Palm House -certainly the most elegant if not the most bulky glass structure in the world; but we will leave it for the present, and turn to the left, for the sake of the Victoria and other houses. Here, on the grass, grows a puzzle for Hybridists-a laburnum between Cylisus nigricans and C. Laburnum. The plant has put forth one branch of nigricans and one of Laburnum; the rest is hybrid. Further on we pass between two paper-mulberry trees -Broussonetia papyrifera-from the Society Islands, which have stood the last seven winters without any protection. We are inclined to discard the word acclimatize, for denoting the supposed process of making a

plant capable of living with us the year round in the open air, and to adopt conclimated, to express the innate power of doing so, originally given to it. On the rockery there, on the other side of the non-perplexing labyrinth of British plants, are a few spare Cactuses and Euphorbias, inserted to give a little style to the group. They are scarcely expected to conclimate, though some of the Opuntias do set up a sort of pretence to half-hardihood, which is no hardihood at all. But till plants, in a new home, are thus tested one by one, the most skilful vegetable anatomist and the most learned physiologist cannot say decidedly, on mere inspection, what lowest degree of temperature any novel species may be exposed to and survive.

We are now approaching an assemblage of glass houses conveniently near to each other, and of most varied contents. Their very outside shell is made to protect and support plants that would by themselves give interest to an ordinary garden. Here, in a narrow bed in front of the house No. 13, are growing in the open air both the Black and the Green Tea shrubs, from either of which the Chinese appear to make any sample at pleasure. (See Fortune's "Wanderings.") The Museum has shown us the powdered Prussian blue which confers the bloom, and other matters employed in the first adulteration in the East, before tea becomes acquainted with the strange company introduced to it in England. In No. 16 is the Assam tea, by means of which we hope to keep these amusing processes entirely to ourselves. Side by side with the Black and the Green grows the Sasanqua Tea, whose blossoms are used to give the bouquet to the two former, At the end of another house grows a Chinese tree peony, the showy and delicate Moutan;-not apparently a very remarkable specimen-but it is the original plant introduced by Sir Joseph Banks, and the grandmother or great-grandmother of most of the Moutans that have settled in European gardens. Take off your hats to it, ye Nurserymen-that plant has been the means of putting something like 100,0007. into your pockets!

There are one or two low small houses that everybody is anxious to peep into. Prying curiosity examines what can be discovered through the keyhole and some supposed chink in the door. Many are the noses flattened against the glass; little regard is paid even to the damaging of a bonnet; a crushed trimming would be a cheap price for a glance into the interior. Why is