I have spoken already of the unrivalled beauty of English gravel. It cannot be too much admired. Kunkur[120] looks extremely smart for a few weeks while it preserves its solidity and freshness, but it is rapidly ground into powder under carriage wheels or blackened by occasional rain and the permanent moisture of low grounds when only partially exposed to the sun and air. Why should not an opulent Rajah or Nawaub send for a cargo of beautiful red gravel from the gravel pits at Kensington? Any English House of Agency here would obtain it for him. It would be cheap in the end, for it lasts at least five times as long as the kunkur, and if of a proper depth admits of repeated turnings with the spade, looking on every turn almost as fresh as the day on which it was first laid down.
Instead of brick-bat edgings, the wealthy Oriental nobleman might trim all his flower-borders with the green box-plant of England, which would flourish I suppose in this climate or in any other. Cobbett in his English Gardener speaks with so much enthusiasm and so much to the purpose on the subject of box as an edging, that I must here repeat his eulogium on it.
The box is at once the most efficient of all possible things, and the prettiest plant that can possibly be conceived; the color of its leaf; the form of its leaf; its docility as to height, width and shape; the compactness of its little branches; its great durability as a plant; its thriving in all sorts of soils and in all sorts of aspects; its freshness under the hottest sun, and its defiance of all shade and drip: these are the beauties and qualities which, for ages upon ages, have marked it out as the chosen plant for this very important purpose.
The edging ought to be clipped in the winter or very early in spring on both sides and at top; a line ought to be used to regulate the movements of the shears; it ought to be clipped again in the same manner about midsummer; and if there be a more neat and beautiful thing than this in the world, all that I can say is, that I never saw that thing.
A small green edging for a flower bed can hardly be too trim; but large hedges with tops and sides cut as flat as boards, and trees fantastically shaped with the shears into an exhibition as full of incongruities as the wildest dream, have deservedly gone out of fashion in England. Poets and prose writers have agreed to ridicule all verdant sculpture on a large scale. Here is a description of the old topiary gardens.
These likewise mote be seen on every side
The shapely box, of all its branching pride
Ungently shorn, and, with preposterous skill
To various beasts, and birds of sundry quill
Transformed, and human shapes of monstrous size.
Also other wonders of the sportive shears
Fair Nature misadorning; there were found
Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers
With spouting urns and budding statues crowned;
And horizontal dials on the ground
In living box, by cunning artists traced,
And galleys trim, or on long voyage bound,
But by their roots there ever anchored fast.
G. West.
The same taste for torturing nature into artificial forms prevailed amongst the ancients long after architecture and statuary had been carried to such perfection that the finest British artists of these times can do nothing but copy and repeat what was accomplished so many ages ago by the people of another nation. Pliny, in his description of his Tuscan villa, speaks of some of his trees having been cut into letters and the forms of animals, and of others placed in such regular order that they reminded the spectator of files of soldiers.[121] The Dutch therefore should not bear all the odium of the topiary style of gardening which they are said to have introduced into England and other countries of Europe. They were not the first sinners against natural taste.