This is the finest country in the world for making gardens speedily.  In the rainy season vegetation springs up at once, as at the stroke of an Enchanter’s wand.  The Landscape gardeners in England used to grieve that they could hardly expect to live long enough to see the effect of their designs.  Such artists would have less reason, to grieve on that account in this country.  Indeed even in England, the source of uneasiness alluded to, is now removed.  “The deliberation with which trees grow,” wrote Horace Walpole, in a letter to a friend, “is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience.  I lament living in so barbarous an age when we are come to so little perfection in gardening.  I am persuaded that 150 years hence it will be as common to remove oaks 150 years old as it now is to plant tulip roots.”  The writer was not a bad prophet.  He has not yet been dead much more than half a century and his expectations are already more than half realized.  Shakespeare could not have anticipated this triumph of art when he made Macbeth ask

    Who can impress the forest?  Bid the tree
    Unfix his earth-bound root?

The gardeners have at last discovered that the largest (though not perhaps the oldest) trees can be removed from one place to another with comparative facility and safety.  Sir H. Stewart moved several hundred lofty trees without the least injury to any of them.  And if broad and lofty trees can be transplanted in England, how much more easily and securely might such a process be effected in the rainy season in this country.  In half a year a new garden might be made to look like a garden of half a century.  Or an old and ill-arranged plantation might thus be speedily re-adjusted to the taste of the owner.  The main object is to secure a good ball of earth round the root, and the main difficulty is to raise the tree and remove it.  Many most ingenious machines for raising a tree from the ground, and trucks for removing it, have been lately invented by scientific gardeners in England.  A Scotchman, Mr. McGlashen, has been amongst the most successful of late transplanters.  He exhibited one of his machines at Paris to the present Emperor of the French, and lifted with it a fir tree thirty feet high.  The French ruler lavished the warmest commendations on the ingenious artist and purchased his apparatus at a large price.[122]

Bengal is enriched with a boundless variety of noble trees admirably suited to parks and pleasure grounds.  These should be scattered about a spacious compound with a spirited and graceful irregularity, and so disposed with reference to the dwelling as in some degree to vary the view of it, and occasionally to conceal it from the visitor driving up the winding road from the outer gate to the portico.  The trees, I must repeat, should be so divided as to give them a free growth and admit sufficient light and air beneath them to allow the grass to flourish.  Grassless ground under park trees has a look of barrenness, discomfort and neglect, and is out of keeping with the general character of the scene.