HORTICULTURE IN NEW ENGLAND.* THE evolution of the art of

horticulture in New England is naturally contemporaneous with the colonisation of that country by English emigrants in the seventeenth century. The Indian tribes whom our adventurous forefathers suc- ceeded had done but little towards cultivating the land, but no sooner had the youngest English settlements been founded, than it became necessary to till the neighbouring country in order to obtain a future supply of food. The Indian women had grown corn in small quantities, clearing the ground with their clam-shell hoes, hiding the produce in

• l'Ito Evolution of Horticulture in Rens England. By Daniel Denison Blade. London : G. r. Putnanes Sons. caches in the earth from the greedy eyes of what a seven- teenth-century writer, quoted by Mr. Slade, calls their " gar-

mandising husbands," and the woods and hillsides and valleys produced quantities of wild berries and roots ; but the white men, especially those later colonists who came over when the first difficult years had been surmounted, had leisure to remember the fair gardens and stately pleasaunces of their native land, and began at once to make orchards and to plant gardens, and to import trees and seeds from the Old Country to the new England over the sea. There is a love of discovery and adventure innate in the Anglo-Saxon race to which the history of the early British settlements in North America must especially appeal; what youthful reader need be content with a fictitious Robinson Crusoe or Man Friday when he can sate his imagination with the true adventures of the Pilgrim Fathers and their faithful Indian Squanto The settlers, in spite of many hardships for want of proper food and shelter from the rigorous New England winters, found themselves before long in a land flowing with milk and honey, the shores of Massachusetts Bay and the adjoining country yielded abundant crops when cultivated and manure&

Indian fashion, with fish ; and fruits and vegetables, native and imported, grew as well or even better than in the Old Country. There are many references to the planting of orchards and fruit - trees in early New England records, but Mr. Slade says (p. 112) that "few records exist of the horticultural progress during the succeeding one hundred years," and a paper written by the Hon. Paul Dudley in 1726 speaks of the cultivation of fruit and vegetables in Roxbury, but makes no mention of flowers. Boston always seems to have been celebrated for its gardens. Wood writes about 1633 :—" This Towne [Boston]. although it be neither the greatest nor the richest, yet it is the most noted and

frequented, being the Center of the Plantations where the monthly Courts are kept. Here likewise dwells the Governour. This place bath very good land, affording rich come-fields, and fruitef all gardens: having likewise sweet and pleasant springs." The references to these old gardens are provokingly slight and unsatisfying. We would rather have had one clear presentment

of an old-world garden revived for us than all Mr. Slade's care- ful and precise catalogue raisonn6 of the early residents in and around Boston, who were celebrated for their " places,"— " And as imagination bodies forth The form of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name,"—

but Mr. Slade is not only the reverse of poetical or imagina- tive, his literary method is confused and rambling, and his style awkward and common-place, as the following passage will show :—

"The gardens of Boston, in the fullest acceptation of the term, combining the useful and ornamental, the orchard, the vegetable and flowering plants (sic), were found in the first half of the eighteenth century, mostly attached to the residences of the more wealthy citizens. References are occasionally and briefly made by writers to a few which existed many years previously. Thus the house of Governor Winthrop, which stood nearly opposite the foot of School Street, was with the garden attached called 'The Green.' We obtain a mere glimpse of the disposition and size of the garden from any accounts extant."

Even of the "most extensive and highly embellished" garden belonging to Gardiner Greene, where was seen one of the first greenhouses in Boston, Mr. Slade only says, "The entire grounds were adorned by both nature and art."

It was after the Revolution that the New Englanders bad once more leisure to cultivate their gardens, and in 1801 a Botanic Garden was established in Cambridge, and a pro- fessor of botany appointed at Harvard College. Improve- ments in gardening and the cultivation of plants were also greatly fostered by the formation of horticultural societies, as they had been in England by the efforts of the Royal Horticultural Society and its frequent exhibitions. We can- not follow Mr. Slade into his disquisition on the three forms s. of modern landscape gardening, which he defines as the Gardenesque, the Picturesque, and the Formal or Geo- metrical. We would rather say with Addison :—" I think there are as many kinds of Gardening as of Poetry : your makers of Parterres and Flower-Gardena are Epigrammatists and Sonneteers in this Art ; contrivers of Bowers and Grottos. Treillages and Cascades, are Romance writers. Wise and London are our heroick Poets As to myself, you will find by the account which I have already given

you, that my Compositions in Gardening are altogether after the Pinclarick manner, and run into the beautiful wild-

ness of Nature, without affecting the nicer Elegancies of Art."

He had already said that he was looked on as "an Humourist in Gardening," and we can imagine the delightful surprises and unexpected vistas that might be expected from such a

character. We fear that Dickens would have immortalised in Martin Chuzzletvit, had he seen it, the extracts from an address

read before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society on suggestions for the ornamentation of burial-grounds, given by Mr. Slade, with all due seriousness, on p. 144, where we read that-

" The skill and taste of the architect should be exerted in the construction of the requisite departments and avenues ; and appropriate trees and plants should decorate its borders; the weeping-willow, waving its graceful drapery over the monumental marble, and the sombre foliage of the cypress should shade it; and the undying daisy should mingle its bright and glowing tints with the native laurel of our forests."

Even a " Humonrist in Gardening" could hardly imagine the

wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower" mingling its "bright and glowing tints" with those of the native laurel of any forest ; but we heartily concur in the sentiment conveyed by the author of this flight of imagination, that churchyards

and cemeteries may become pages in the book of daily life decorated with flowers and tender memories, instead of bare

records of our dead, into whose arid and dtserted ways we could not look without a feeling of desolation. The planting of trees as memorials of a family or in commemoration of some event are the most abiding links between one generation and another. Surely nothing could better recall our common ancestry to the New Englander of this cen- tury than the contemplation of trees planted by the early settlers, such as the apple-tree "planted by Peregrine White, the first child of the Pilgrims, at Marshfield, in 1648; the pear-tree imported by Governor Prince in 1640, from England,

and planted on his estate at Ea.stham ; another pear-tree in Yarmouth set out by Anthony Thacher in 1640, and which was bearing fruit in 1872." The most indifferent and the most quarrelsome of men will bury their differences over the growing of roses and lilies, and the verdict on the white rose or the red rose side need not necessarily lead to civil war.

Flowers are civilisers and hereditary peacemakers, and a great nation like the United States does well to assist at the spreading of knowledge on such a subject. The New

Englanders may honestly be proud of their improvements in horticulture during the last century as recounted by Mr.

Slade; at the same time we could have wished the noble art a more interesting, though possibly not a more painstaking, exponent than the author of the volume in question.