These artists in scenery, one of them insists, on a foundation of painting and gardening “must possess a competent knowledge of _surveying_, _mechanics_, _hydraulics_, _agriculture_, _botany_, and the general principles of _architecture_,” besides professing themselves _cognoscenti_ and _virtuosi_. They dealt with gardens mainly as one feature in a larger field of operations, the laying-out of parks, pleasure-ground, _fermes ornées_, and such fanciful paradises as Shenstone made famous at the Leasowes. Into the park, of course, the garden proper passes by transition over the lawn turf that is the special beauty of English culture, often separated from less trim outskirts by the invisible barrier of a sunk fence, said to have been Kent’s invention, but this statement seems dubious, as may be Horace Walpole’s story that the name _Ha-ha_ expressed a rustic’s astonishment at being brought to an unexpected stand. But for poets like Cowley and Marvell, who courted “a green thought in a green shade,” it was left for writers of our time to dwell lovingly on the garden they love, however small; the tasteful authorities of that century hardly condescend to notice anything below the pleasure-grounds that ran into lordly demesnes. Humphry Repton, doyen of a later generation of improvers smiled at by Jane Austen, in his proposals for Woburn Abbey, distinguishes the gardens about a country-seat under the following heads:--- The terrace and parterre near the house. The private garden, only used by the family. The rosary, or dressed flower garden, in front of the greenhouse. The American garden, for plants of that country only. The Chinese garden, surrounding a pool in front of the great Chinese pavilion, to be decorated with plants from China. The botanic garden, for scientific classing of plants. The animated garden, or menagerie. And lastly, the English garden or shrubbery walk, connecting the whole; sometimes commanding views into each of these distinct objects and sometimes into the park and distant country. This plan was much on the model of what had grown up at Kew, to which let us return, after recalling that before its grounds came into note, Queen Caroline had begun or enlarged the gardens about Richmond Lodge, extending them over an unkempt flat, as we understand from her private laureate, Stephen Duck. To poets of his school there was no beauty in heath and wild copses, like the rough patch of Sheen Common still left to the gratitude of our Bank-Holiday age. Not so attractive lately shone the plain, A gloomy waste, not worth the Muse’s strain; Where thorny brakes the traveller repell’d, And weeds and thistles overspread the field; Till royal George, and heav’nly Caroline Bid Nature in harmonious lustre shine; The sacred fiat thro’ the chaos rung And symmetry from wild disorder sprung.