John James, who translated Le Blond's "Theory and Practice of Gardening, wherein is fully handled all that relates to fine gardens, commonly called Pleasure-gardens," cuts, 4to. 1712.
M. Stevenson published in small 4to. 1661, a book called The Twelve Months, being a Treatise on Husbandry and Gardening.
The Rev. Henry Stevenson, of East Retford, published "The Young Gardener's Director," 1716, 12mo. He has introduced Mr. Evelyn's advice as to having salads in each month. There is a neat cut of flower-knots, and the frontispiece exhibits a curious old garden. In the preface he says, "not to mention the profit to a family, nothing conduces more to a man's health, especially to one that lives a sedentary life. If these observations and experiments I have made in gardening, be of use to any by drawing him to a way of diversion that will preserve his health, and perhaps put him upon a meditation on the great works of the creation, let him give the Creator the praise." He also published "The Gentleman Gardener Instructed;" eighth edition, 12mo. 1769.
David Stevenson, in 1746, published in 12mo. The Gentleman Gardener Instructed. Is this the same book as the above?
Stephen Switzer, of whose private history so very little is known, but whose works shew him to have been an honest, unassuming, humane, religious, most industrious, and ingenious man. We only know that he had a garden on Milbank, and another near Vauxhall; and that he died, I believe, about 1745. He dates his Letter on the Cythesis, from New Palace Yard, 1730. He was a native of Hampshire; for in his Fruit Gardener, speaking of walnut-trees, he says, "The best I ever saw are those that grow upon chalk. Such are those that grow about Ewell, near Epsom, and in many places of my own native county of Hampshire, there being one cut down some few years ago in the Park belonging to the Right Honourable the Lady Russell, at Stratton, that did spread, at least, fifty yards diameter." He acknowledges, without murmuring, his meanness of fortune, and his having industriously submitted "to the meanest labours of the scythe, spade, and wheel-barrow." He became, however, eminent in his day, and added much to the beauty and magnificence of the gardens of many of our chief nobility and gentry. He wrote a history of the art he so loved, and therefore his classic History of Gardening, prefixed to his Ichnographia Rustica, merits the perusal of every one attached to gardens; and paints in strong colours his own devotion to that art; and which he thus concludes:—"In short, next to the more immediate duties of religion, 'tis in the innocency of these employs, thus doing, thus planting, dressing, and busying themselves, that all wise and intelligent persons would be found, when Death, the king of terrors, shall close their eyes, and they themselves be obliged to bid an eternal farewell to these and all other sublunary pleasures;" and he who was thus fond of breathing the sweet and fragrant air of gardens, thus expresses his own (perhaps expiring) wish in the lines of Cowley:
Sweet shades, adieu! here let my dust remain,
Covered with flowers, and free from noise and pain;
Let evergreens the turfy tomb adorn,
And roseate dews (the glory of the morn)
My carpet deck; then let my soul possess
The happier scenes of an eternal bliss.
He asks "What solid pleasure is there not to be found in gardening? Its pursuit is easy, quiet, and such as put neither the body nor mind into those violent agitations, or precipitate and imminent dangers that many other exercises (in themselves very warrantable) do. The end of this is health, peace, and plenty, and the happy prospect of felicities more durable than any thing in these sublunary regions, and to which this is (next to the duties of religion) the surest path." His attachment to some of our own poets, and to the classic authors of antiquity, discovers itself in many of his pages; and his devout turn of mind strongly shines throughout. His allusion to Homer, in vol. iii. page 7, sufficiently shews how ardently this industrious servant, this barrow wheeler, must have searched the great writers of ancient times, to discover their attachment to rural nature, and to gardens. His candid and submissive mind thus speaks:—"If we would, therefore, arrive at any greater perfection than we are in gardening, we must cashiere that mathematical stiffness in our gardens, and imitate nature more; how that is to be done, will appear in the following chapters, which though they may not be, as new designs scarce ever are, the most perfect, it will at least excite some after-master to take pen and pencil in hand, and finish what is here thus imperfectly begun, and this is my comfort, that I shall envy no man that does it. I have, God be praised, learned to admire, and not envy every one that outgoes me: and this will, I hope, go a great way in making me easy and happy under the pressures of a very narrow fortune, and amidst the ruffles of an ill-natured world. I have tasted too severely of the lashes of man, to take any great satisfaction in any thing but doing my duty."[39] In his devout and magnificent Essay on the Sun, he says, "'tis admirable that this planet should, through so many ages of the world, maintain an uninterrupted course, that in so many thousands of revolving years, it should retain the same light, heat, and vigour, and every morning renew its wonted alacrity, and dart its cherishing beams on these dull and gloomy scenes of melancholy and misery, and yet that so few of us rightly consider its power, or are thankful to Divine Omnipotence for it. The great Roscommon (not greater than good) speaks of it with divine transport, and exhorts mankind to admire it, from the benefits and celestial beams it displays on the world:—
Great eye of all, whose glorious ray
Rules the bright empire of the day;
O praise his name, without whose purer light
Thou hadst been hid in an abyss of night."[40]
Switzer (as appears from the Preface to his Iconologia) was so struck with the business and pleasures of a country life, that he collected, or meant to collect, whatever he could respecting this subject, scattered up and down as they were in loose irregular papers and books; but this work, we regret to say, never made its appearance. That he would have done this well, may be guessed at from so many of his pages recording what he calls "the eternal duration" of Virgil's works, or those of "the noble and majestic" Milton:—
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which no nice art
In beds, and curious knots, but nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain.