and indicate an absence of all true judgment.  This practice of over-filling a garden is an instance of bad taste, analogous to that which is so conspicuously characteristic of our own countrymen in India with respect to their apartments, which look more like an upholsterer’s show-rooms or splendid ornament-shops than drawing-rooms or parlours.  There is scarcely space enough to turn in them without fracturing some frail and costly bauble.  Where a garden is over-planted the whole place is darkened, the ground is green and slimy, the grass thin, sickly and straggling, and the trees and shrubs deficient in freshness and vigor.

Not only should the native gentry avoid having their flower-borders too thickly filled,—­they should take care also that they are not too broad.  We ought not to be obliged to leave the regular path and go across the soft earth of the bed to obtain a sight of a particular shrub or flower.  Close and entangled foliage keeps the ground too damp, obstructs wholesome air, and harbours snakes and a great variety of other noxious reptiles.  Similar objections suggest the propriety of having no shrubs or flowers or even a grass-plot immediately under the windows and about the doors of the house.  A well exposed gravel or brick walk should be laid down on all sides of the house, as a necessary safeguard against both moisture and vermin.

I have spoken already of the unrivalled beauty of English gravel.  It cannot be too much admired. Kunkur[120] looks extremely smart for a few weeks while it preserves its solidity and freshness, but it is rapidly ground into powder under carriage wheels or blackened by occasional rain and the permanent moisture of low grounds when only partially exposed to the sun and air.  Why should not an opulent Rajah or Nawaub send for a cargo of beautiful red gravel from the gravel pits at Kensington?  Any English House of Agency here would obtain it for him.  It would be cheap in the end, for it lasts at least five times as long as the kunkur, and if of a proper depth admits of repeated turnings with the spade, looking on every turn almost as fresh as the day on which it was first laid down.

Instead of brick-bat edgings, the wealthy Oriental nobleman might trim all his flower-borders with the green box-plant of England, which would flourish I suppose in this climate or in any other.  Cobbett in his English Gardener speaks with so much enthusiasm and so much to the purpose on the subject of box as an edging, that I must here repeat his eulogium on it.

The box is at once the most efficient of all possible things, and the prettiest plant that can possibly be conceived; the color of its leaf; the form of its leaf; its docility as to height, width and shape; the compactness of its little branches; its great durability as a plant; its thriving in all sorts of soils and in all sorts of aspects; its freshness under the hottest sun, and its defiance of all shade and drip:  these are the beauties and qualities which, for ages upon ages, have marked it out as the chosen plant for this very important purpose.