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THE

GARDENER'S MAGAZINE,

FEBRUARY, 1830.

PART I.

ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE.

ART. I. Notes and Reflections made during a Tour through Part of France and Germany, in the Autumn of the Year 1828. By the CONDUCTOR.

(Continued from Vol. V. p. 649.)

PARIS, Sept. 6. 1828.- We were in Paris and its neighbourhood till October 10., when we left that city for Germany; we returned on December 10., and remained till the middle of January, 1829. After some general remarks on the vicinity of Paris, as compared with the vicinity of London, we shall arrange our notes under the heads of Public Gardens; Royal Gardens; Commercial Gardens; Villa Gardens and Country Residences; Agricultural Establishments and Manufactories connected with Agriculture; Architectural Improvements; and Garden Societies, Institutions, and Literature.

The natural circumstances of the vale of London and the plain of Paris differ in various particulars. The surface of the country and the soil in the vicinity of Paris are more favourable to gardening than they are in the neighbourhood of London; but the climate and almost every other circumstance are less favourable. This is speaking of gardening as including all its branches, and with particular reference to landscape-gardening. The surface of the country in the neighbourhood of Paris is more irregular than that around London; and those irregularities have more character, because they are for the most part produced by masses more or less stony or rocky. The hills at Montmartre and Montmorency are less like heaps of alluvial soil or gravel than the hills at VOL. VI.- No. 24.

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Highgate and Greenwich. The soil is more favourable around Paris, because it is every where calcareous, and on a dry bottom. The climate is better adapted for ripening fruits and blossoming fine flowers than that of London; but, from the heat and dryness of the air in summer, and the severity of the winter, greatly inferior to it in the production of culinary vegetables, and indeed in the growth of plants of nearly every kind throughout the whole year. It is particularly unfavourable to the culture of herbage grasses; and hence the difficulty, amounting almost to an impossibility, of producing close green turf. In respect to water, as far as landscapegardening is concerned, London and Paris may be considered on a par; for, though the Thames is broader than the Seine, the banks of the latter river are more varied in natural character than those of the Thames. With regard to culture, the climate of London renders watering comparatively unnecessary in the neighbourhood of Paris, the watering of crops in the open air is one of the principal summer labours of the gardener. The scenery around Paris has an advantage over that round London, in possessing a number of natural woods of considerable extent, and a greater proportion of open lands and waste, surrounded by high cultivation; round London very little of nature remains. Thus much as to the natural circumstances of the vicinity of Paris, compared with those of the vicinity of London.

In artificial circumstances the two districts are strikingly different. The vicinity of Paris is all nakedness and long lines; that of London all clothing and accumulations of houses and trees, with abrupt or circuitous lines. The approaches to Paris on every side are characterised by straight roads, straight rows of trees, straight avenues and alleys, and straight lines in almost every thing. The approaches to London are not characterised by lines; the roads, fences, trees, and alleys in woods, are irregular, and neither strikingly crooked or curved, nor always straight. In the neighbourhood of Paris every thing bears the marks of legislative influence: the dwellings of every village and every detached house are numbered; the city has a marked boundary, is only to be entered through certain public gates, and, on leaving it, you are at once in the country. Round London it is on every side difficult to say where the city ends and the country begins; the one passing insensibly into the other for miles of distance, and green fields, gardens, villas, streets, and churches blending together, till at last the traveller finds himself in the heart of the city. There is, unquestionably, much more of art round London than round Paris, because there is much more wealth:

but round London the art displays itself in a different way; the exertions of individuals in building and gardening are every where apparent; but there are no particular evidences of a controlling government or police; and the different entrances to the metropolis, being unmarked by gates, differ only from the entrances to an English village by being on a larger scale. Every thing in the neighbourhood of London has an air of liberty, even to the indulgence of caprice or whim; every thing round Paris bears an air of restraint, even to the size of the paving stones in the highways, and of the panes of glass in the windows, and the numerical letters on the houses. In London and its neighbourhood you have streets and roads paved, gravelled, laid with flints, or Macadamised with granite; in Paris and its environs you have either a regular causeway of the same width, curvature, and of the same-sized stones, or the native soil without any artificial covering. In and around London you have Grecian, Roman, Italian, Gothic, Moresque, and Chinese windows of innumerable varieties, and panes of all sizes, from that of the lattice window glazed in lead lap, to the plates of glass in some private dwellings, as Mr. Hope's of Duchess Street, and some shops, as several in Regent Street, Oxford Street, and New Bond Street, of the size of an entire window. In and around Paris there is very little variety in either the size or architectural style of windows, scarcely any Gothic or lattice-work, except in the churches, and the panes of a palace are not much larger than those of a cottage.

The geometrical character imposed on the roads by the government has been imitated by the inhabitants in every thing; and may be recognised in their woods, gardens, divisions of fields, vineyards, and even in the prevalence of the row culture in spade aration; most certainly in the correctness with which French labourers dig ditches or plant trees in rows by the eye, without the use of a line, which very far surpasses any thing to be met with in England. Among the innumerable boundaries of plantations and hedge divisions of fields which are seen every where in England, there is not perhaps one line in ten that is straight; in the same boundaries and hedge lines in France, there certainly is not one line in ten that is crooked. Nothing is crooked or irregular in France; nothing is left to chance; every thing is regulated by authority. But a great deal in England being also regulated by authority, how comes it that the result is sameness and uniformity in the one country, and irregularity and variety in the other? The authority in France is one, that of the central

government in Britain the authorities are many; those of the counties, the parishes, and the local commissioners of public works. There seems to be another reason for the prevalence of geometrical forms and lines in France, and we may say the Continent generally. In France, till lately, all public situations were filled exclusively by the class designated as noble, and which, for the greater part, were educated and instructed more especially in those departments of knowledge, such as geometry, fortification, &c., which tended to fit them for the army. In Britain important situations of every kind are procured more through wealth in the candidate or his friends, than through any other cause; and wealth, even if it should be accompanied by ignorance, generally enables a man to think for himself, and act accordingly. This is more particularly the case when that wealth happens to have been. accumulated by the talent or industry of the individual. Hence we see the business of one parish, or the laying out and repairs of one line of road, managed on one principle, and another parish and road on a different plan, or perhaps without either plan or principle: one parish employing their poor among the farmers, another employing them on the roads; one road convex, and another nearly flat, &c. There is this convenience in adopting geometrical forms, that, when they are objected to, they can always be referred to a definite reason. No man can dispute the fact, that the shortest line between any two points on an even surface will be straight; but if it were attempted to lay out a curved or irregular line between these two points, as possessing particular local advantages, or as being more beautiful, every one might dispute the advantages and the beauty.

The dry and comparatively clear atmosphere, the dry soil, and the airy open surface of the country, in consequence of the almost total absence of hedges as separations or divisions of property, or enclosures of fields, render the environs of Paris, we should imagine, much more healthy than the environs of London; but we do not think it is in the nature of the climate and soil to support that deep, luxuriant, and perpetual green vegetation which abounds every where in the vale of the British metropolis. As a proof of this, we may refer to the vegetation of the remains of natural forests round the two capitals. In those of France there will be found in the winter season few evergreens, and scarcely any green turf: in Windsor Forest we have hollies; on Hounslow Heath the furze; and on Box Hill the box, the juniper, and the yew. All these shrubs are rare in the native

woods in the neighbourhood of Paris. In winter, indeed, the difference between the environs of Paris and London is still more remarkable than in summer, from the almost total absence of evergreen shrubs in the gardens and plantations of the former, and their great abundance in those of the latter. The excellent gravel and turf of London, and the very bad gravel and turf of Paris and the Continent generally, have been too often mentioned to have escaped the reader's recollection.

The evidences of wealth and taste are incomparably greater in the neighbourhood of London than in the neighbourhood of Paris. The character of the Parisian taste consists in display and superficialness; that of the English in comfort and neatness: the Englishman seems to wish to be thought happy in his family; the Frenchman in the society of his friends and in the eyes of the public: eating, drinking, and sleeping, call forth the social sympathies of the Englishman; talking, hearing, and rejoicing, those of the Frenchman.

The City of Paris as compared with London is, we think, a better planned congregation of buildings. The outer and the inner boulevards, like our breathing zones (Vol. V. p. 687.), are at once sources of health and of utility; for they admit a free current of air, and persons going from one distant part of the town to another may always, by means of the numerous public vehicles, which ply in both directions in these zones, save both time and fatigue. The streets of Paris are, for the most part, narrower than those of London, and they are generally without footpaths. It would certainly be advisable in this city, as in most of the old ones of Europe, for the proper authorities to form a plan for widening and finally arranging the streets, the average supply of water, gas, heat, &c., and to provide for its gradual execution, say in the course of half a century. By promulgating this plan, which ought to include also provision for indefinite increase outwards, property and situations now peculiarly favourable for business would gradually vary from their present to their ultimate value, whether greater or less than at present; so that the execution of the plan gradually and at distant periods would be nothing like so expensive as its immediate or early execution. Paris, in its present state, where the houses are so close together, and where so many families are lodged under one roof, appears to us to be very favourably circumstanced for being heated by public companies. Whether steam or hot water would be better adapted for this purpose, we are not prepared to state; but nothing could be easier than to heat whole streets from one

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