Most poets have a painter's eye for the disposition of forms and colors. Kent's practice as a painter no doubt helped to make him what he was as a landscape-gardener. "When an architect was consulted about laying out the grounds at Blenheim, he replied "You must send for a landscape-painter:" he might have added - "or a poet." Our late Laureate, William Wordsworth, exhibited great taste in his small garden at Rydal Mount. He said of himself - very truly, though not very modestly, perhaps, - but modesty was never Wordsworth's weakness - that Nature seemed to have fitted him for three callings - that of the poet, the critic on works of art, and the landscape-gardener. The poet's nest (Mrs. Hemans calls it "a lovely cottage-like building") is almost hidden in a rich profusion of Roses, and Ivy, and Jessamine, and Virginia Creeper. Wordsworth, though he passionately admired the shapes and hues of flowers, knew nothing of their fragrance. In this respect knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out. He had possessed at no time of his life the sense of smell.

To make up for this deficiency, he is said (by De Quincy) to have had "a peculiar depth of organic sensibility of form and color." Mr. Justice Coleridge tells us that Wordsworth dealt with shrubs, flower-beds and lawns with the readiness of a practised landscape-gardener, and that it was curious to observe how he had imparted a portion of his taste to his servant, James Dixon. In fact, honest James regarded himself as a sort of arbiter digantiarum. The master and his servant often discussed together a question of taste. Wordsworth communicated to Mr. Justice Coleridge how "he and James" were once "in a puzzle" about certain discolored spots upon the lawn. "Cover them with soap-lees," said the master. "That will make the green there darker than the rest," said the gardener. "Then we must cover the whole." "That will not do," objects the gardener, "with reference to the little lawn to which you pass from this." "Cover that," said the poet. "You will then,"replied the gardener, " have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage surrounding it." Mrs. Hemans once took up her abode for some weeks with Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, and was so charmed with the country around, that she was induced to take a cottage called Dove's Nest, which overlooked the lake of Windermere. But tourists and idlers so haunted her retreat, and so worried her for autographs and album contributions, that she was obliged to make her escape.

Her little cottage and garden in the village of Waver-tree, near Liverpool, seem to have met the fate which has befallen so many of the residences of the poets. "Mrs. Hemans's little flower-garden" (says a late visitor)"was no more - but rank grass and weeds sprang up luxuriously; many of the windows were broken; the entrance-gate was off its hinges: the Vine in front of the house trailed along the ground, and a board, with 'This house to let' upon it, was nailed on the door. I entered the deserted garden and looked into the little parlor, once so full of taste and elegance; it was gloomy and cheerless. The paper was spotted with damp, and spiders had built their webs in the corner. As I mused on the uncertainty of human life, I exclaimed with the eloquent Burke, - ' What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" Pope too had communicated to his gardener at Twickenham some of his own taste. The man, long after his master's death, in reference to the training of the branches of plants, used to talk of their being made to hang "something poetical? All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his latter days at New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and beautiful garden.

Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green lawns, its pleached alleys and Honeysuckle bowers." In this garden Shakspeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry, introduced into England in 1548. In 1605 James I issued a royal edict recommending the cultivation of silkworms, and offering packets of Mulberry seeds to those amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakspeare's tree was planted in 1609. - (Flowers and Flower Gardens, by Richardson).