The profession of a gentleman's gardener will never be what it has been, for this simple reason, that his employer is no longer, and never will be again, what he once was. The higher classes, feeling themselves obliged to retrench, though they will never be able to do without gardeners, will yet learn to dispense with those departments of the profession which are more especially luxuries; and the gardener will be required to extend his management to the woods, or to the farm, or to both. He will, at the same time, while acting in the united capacity of gardener and bailiff, find it requisite to possess more botanical knowledge than he does at present; bacause, as the higher classes get poorer, they will live more upon their own estates, and enter more and more into country pursuits. They will give up forcing various sorts of fruit and vegetables, so as to have them ripe at unnatural seasons, when their only value consists in the difficulty and expense attending their attainment; but every country seat will have its arboretum, and herbaceous ground, and there will be no end to the number of representative systems of hardy plants. As the attention of landed proprietors, and particularly that of their wives and daughters, will be now more exclusively directed to botany, and other branches of natural history, they will obviously require from their gardeners more knowledge in these sciences. That they will find persons possessing this knowledge, and, at the same time, obtain from them a more varied and more extended description of service, we have not a doubt; because the situation of head gardener, or general manager of an estate, is too comfortable a one not to produce abundance of candidates, with whatever degree of skill for which there may be a demand. In respect to wages, though these may be nominally smaller than at present, they will always be such as to command at least as many of the comforts and conveniences of life as gardeners now enjoy; most probably more. Our object, in making these remarks, is to prepare the minds of gardeners for the comparatively new state of things which they will find gradually coming upon them. The young and scientific have nothing to fear; every year their value will be better and better understood: but the young, whose education has been neglected, and the grown-up gardener, who belongs to what may be called the old school, may henceforth both lay their account with falling rather than rising in the world.
