As the interval of nearly a year we resume the notes on our tour and print them as they were written at the time, on the evenings of every day. It may, perhaps, be necessary, for the sake of some of our readers, to premise that the time when these notes were made has very little to do with their value, whatever that value may be. That value depends entirely on the principles developed and illustrated by the criticisms made on different places and scenes; and hence, as far as the reader is concerned, it matters little whether these places and scenes were seen a few months, or a few years, before the time of publishing the remarks on them. It would be far easier for us to fill this Magazine with papers by our correspondents, on the cultivation of particular plants or crops, than to write long articles in it ourselves; but we are guided in selecting, preparing, or writing articles for publication, soley by what we consider to be the wants of our readers, whether practical gardeners, or their employers. It will be allowed, we think, that, both in the culture of flowers and of culinary crops and fruits, the present race of gardeners have arrived at a very high degree of perfection; and their employers, who consume or enjoy these articles, we may conclude, must be very good Judges of them. The articles exhibited at the horticultural shows in the neighbourhood of London, throughout the country, afford such a proof of the practical skill of gardeners as cannot possibly be denied; and the same shows afford also a presumptive proof of the cultivated taste of the proprietors in whose gardens these productions have been raised. What we think both the employers of gardeners, and gardeners selves, most deficient in, at the present day, is in what relates to taste in gardening as an elegant art; that is, in the art of laying out and planting pleasure grounds and parks, and keeping them in order afterwards. Even in laying out flower gardens, which may be considered the easiest and simplest part of landscape-gardening, the gardeners of the present day, and their employers, are strikingly deficient. Will any artist, -a painter or an architect for example,-at all acquainted with the general principles of composition in lines and forms, say that there is one flower-garden in a hundred laid out in accordance with these principles?
