deny it when they wish to prove this
earth fallen and accursed. Mr. Nesfield can make landscapes, by
obedience to certain laws which Nature is apt to disregard in the
struggle for existence, more beautiful than they are already by
Nature; and that without introducing foreign forms of vegetation.
But if foreign forms, wisely chosen for their shapes and colours, be
added, the beauty may be indefinitely increased. For the plants
most capable of beautifying any given spot do not always grow
therein, simply because they have not yet arrived there; as may be
seen by comparing any wood planted with Rhododendrons and Azaleas
with the neighbouring wood in its native state. Thus may be
obtained somewhat of that variety and richness which is wanting
everywhere, more or less, in the vegetation of our northern zone,
only just recovering slowly from the destructive catastrophe of the
glacial epoch; a richness which, small as it is, vanishes as we
travel northward, till the drear landscape is sheeted more and more
with monotonous multitudes of heather, grass, fir, or other social
plants.

But even in the Tropics the virgin forest, beautiful as it is, is
without doubt much less beautiful, both in form and colours, than it
might be made. Without doubt, also, a mere clearing, after a few
years, is a more beautiful place than the forest; because by it
distance is given, and you are enabled to see the sky, and the
forest itself beside; because new plants, and some of them very
handsome ones, are introduced by cultivation, or spring up in the
rastrajo; and lastly, but not least, because the forest on the edge
of the clearing is able to feather down to the ground, and change
what is at first a bare tangle of stems and boughs into a softly
rounded bank of verdure and flowers. When, in some future
civilisation, the art which has produced, not merely a Chatsworth or
a Dropmore, but an average English shrubbery or park, is brought to
bear on tropic vegetation, then Nature, always willing to obey when
conquered by fair means, will produce such effects of form and
colour around tropic estates and cities as we cannot fancy for
ourselves.

Mr. Wallace laments (and rightly) the absence in the tropic forests
of such grand masses of colour as are supplied by a heather moor, a
furze or broom-croft, a field of yellow charlock, blue bugloss, or
scarlet poppy. Tropic landscape gardening will supply that defect