from Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2016
Even a Riding, which in extent differs so widely from a garden, yet agrees with it in many particulars; for, exclusive of that community of character which results from their being both improvements, and both destined to pleasure, a closer relation arises from the property of a riding, to extend the idea of a seat, and appropriate a whole country to the mansion; for which purpose it must be distinguished from common roads; and the marks of distinction must be borrowed from a garden; those which a farm or a park can supply are faint and few; but whenever circumstances belonging to a garden occur, they are immediately received as evidence of the domaine; the species of the trees will often be decisive; plantations of firs, whether placed on the sides of the way, or in clumps or woods in the view, denote the neighbourhood of a seat; even limes and horse-chesnuts are not indifferent; for they have always been frequent in improvements, and rare in the ordinary scenes of cultivated nature: if the riding be carried through a wood, the shrubs, which for their beauty or their fragrance, have been transplanted from the country into gardens, such as the sweet-briar, the viburnum, the euonymus, and the wood-bine, should be encouraged in the underwood; and to these may be added several which are still peculiar to shruberies, but which might easily be transferred to the wildest coverts, and would require no further care.
Where the species are not, the disposition may be particular; and any appearance of design is a mark of improvement; a few trees standing out from a hedge-row, raise it to an elegance above common rusticity; and still more may be done by clumps in a field; they give it the air of a park: a close lane may be decorated with plantations in all the little vacant spaces: and even the groupes originally on the spot, (whether it be a wood, a field, or a lane,) if properly selected, and those only left which are elegant, will have an effect; though every beauty of this kind may be found in nature, yet many of them are seldom seen together, and never unmixed.
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