Woodhouselee, J. Bell, Esq., contains a considerable collection of flowering plants, a recent importation of curious trees and shrubs from Booth of Hamburgh, and remarkably complete farm buildings; but the edgings are bad. The gardener, Alexander Todd, is a scientific man, and has a clean neat house of two rooms without closets, but which requires an addition, as he is now obliged to make use of his bed-room as a dairy. This ought not to be the case, especially where a man has, like Mr. Todd, a family of five or six children. We shall have a good deal to say of this place when giving the details of our tour. Mrs. Maxwell's garden, near Mr. Bell's, contains a very interesting collection of trees and shrubs. The gardener at Woodslee, William Scott, is a strong-minded man, and intelligent in his profession. In this part of the country we first met with the old Scottish and French custom of placing a bed, always the best, in the parlour. We could wish to see the custom done away with, in order that gardeners' houses in Scotland might have comfortable parlours, like those of their brethren in England. We sought in vain, in this neighbourhood, for the late Duchess of Buccleugh's cottage, called the Bower, built on an impending high rock on the banks of the Esk, with a beautiful flower-garden annexed, which we saw about this season in the year 1805; but we were informed by Mr. Bell, on returning from Langholm, that the large sandstone rock on which both the cottage and the garden were placed, and which formed altogether an immense mass, resting on a soft decomposing base, was undermined by a dreadful flood (we believe in 1816), and the whole falling into the water with a tremendous crash was carried down the stream, and totally destroyed. The duchess was never informed of the fate of her favourite Bower, and care was taken to dissuade her from ever coming to visit it.
