485. English gardening was introduced into Poland by the Princess Isabella Czartoryska, at Pulhawa. This lady, highly accomplished, of great taste, and much good sense, had been a considerable time in England. She carried to Poland a gardener, Savage, and with his assistance, and that of Vogel and Frey, artists of Warsaw, she laid out Pulhawa, between 1780 and 1784, and published in Polish (Mysli Rozne o Sposobie Zakladania Ogrodow) a work, with plates, on English gardening, in 1801. The situation of Pulhawa (fig. 154.), like almost every other with which we are acquainted in Poland or Russia, is flat and sandy; but is somewhat relieved by the Vistula. It is about seventy English miles from Warsaw. On the brink of this river, on a wooded bank, stands the house, a plain Grecian building, which with the grounds are described by Burnet, in his View of Poland (chap. xi.). There are several decorative buildings and statues (fig. 155.): detached clumps of shrubs are more frequent in these gardens than would be admitted by a good taste in England; but all Poland is a natural forest; and as the grand object of improvement, in every country, is to obtain applause by the employment of art and expense, artificial forms, from their rarity, are better calculated for this purpose than such as are more universally beautiful, but so common locally as to want the charm of novelty, - or whose beauties are too refined to be generally understood. Thus, clumps in Poland may be as much esteemed as groups are in England, on the same principle that, in a wild country, butcher-meat is more esteemed than game, because the latter is the common food.
