with the flowers. No more delightful picture can be imagined than that of His Excellency, Thomas Jefferson, commissioned shortly Minister Plenipotentiary to Europe, a few years later strolling through the beautiful pleasure gardens of old England within the shadow of stately old castles, with Whateley's Book on Gardening, according to his own account, open in his hand, affirming its accuracy, and directing his inquiries to such practical things as might enable him to estimate the expense of making such gardens for himself. He wondered at the size of the garden at Blenheim Castle, with its two hundred acres, great expanses of water, twelve acres of kitchen garden, and two hundred people employed to keep it in order. He noted carefully that the turf was mowed once in ten days. "The cascade from the lake is a fine one," he said, but he liked it not, and "art appeared too much." He visited Hampton Court, Chiswick, Pope's garden at Twickenham, and Stowe, the Duke of Buckingham's garden improved by Capability Brown, the landscape gardener, whose work is known today to garden lovers.
In his walks, and rides in his crane neck chariot, with fine ladies, in and around Paris, he came to know the gardens and flowers there, and his journal records most interesting observations on the plant life of Southern France and Italy made during a journey there. He noted sweetbriar, cream-yellow clover in beautiful blooming fields and an abundance of yellow iris. "From the first olive fields of Pierrelatte to the orangeries of Hières," he wrote Lafayette, "has been continued rapture to me." He made a trip of three weeks out of his way to get first-hand knowledge in regard to
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