We like to see a garden well laid out and cultivated. There is something in the contemplation of its design, the harmony of its parts, and the neatness and skill with which it is kept up, that affords a peculiar kind of gratification to every true lover of the beautiful in art or nature. But all gardens are not well cultivated. Some have no design, and are but a heterogeneous aggregate of an absurd and preposterous fancy, - expensive it may be, but nothing more. No one portion of them is in keeping with another, though every walk and bed is scrupulously clean - this is the gardener's pride, and he "lays himself out on it" with perfect composure; for his knowledge of what a garden ought to be, uhath this extent, no more." Again we see design, and a certain harmony in every department, but the whole lacks that great essential, taste - the combination of all the elements embraced in location and surface, developed with sound and discriminative judgment A flat surface and straight lines in the walks, the trees, the shrubbery, form the ultimatum of many gardeners' ambition, and they will take infinite pains to destroy every natural beauty, in order to accomplish this most undesirable and monotonous object.

But we did not set out to speak so much of tasteful designs, and the laying out of gardens, as of their being well cultivated. The divisions of them may be round or square, or oval, or of any shape or size, the surface flat or undulating, the soil poor or rich, sandy or loamy, the advantages of location and aspect good or bad, yet the question comes at last, is the garden cultivated with skill, and according to the best lights of scientific horticulture? What is cultivation? To the man of science there is but one answer to this question; with the superficial and illiterate there are many, and scarcely any two of these shall agree in their definition. One man removes the wild strawberry from the woods and plants it in his garden. With him this is cultivation - a mere change of place - the soil, most likely, being less suited to its growth than that from which it was transplanted. Upon this principle, whatever is in the garden is in a state of cultivation, and for no better reason than because the common operations of hoeing, digging, weeding and raking are performed herein.

True, these are parts of a whole in making up a complete system of culture, but they are not the system itself, and if nothing more were required or done, vegetation would ultimately languish, and become essentially retrograde.

Another gardener (and there are many such) transplants a small tree from a hedge to one of his garden plots. He knows just enough of vegetable physiology to reduce the head and branches somewhat, and to keep the tree exact and steady, to facilitate its rooting. This accomplished, the tree has (to him) been brought into a state of cultivation, and he expects it to grow and flourish far more rapidly and certainly than if it had been permitted to stand where it originally sprung from the earth. If it does not fulfil his expectations, the fault lay in the tree, and not in any act of omission on his part, by which the cultivation of it should have been perfected. Such a gardener knows (generally speaking,) just enough to be quite at his ease in the performance of certain duties pertaining to his calling, and to render him obstinate in receiving further enlightenment from his employer or any body else. There are such men as we very well know, capital operators with the hoe, the spade, and the rake, doing well what the hands alone may do, but without the mind and skill to give them the only proper direction. Cultivation has a meaning with them, but it is very remote from the truth, and limited to certain acts of a purely mechanical nature.

There are grades of intelligence among gardeners, and we have commenced our illustrations with the lowest. Let us pass on to a more enlightened class, and see what they understand by the term cultivation.

If one of these men is asked for the meaning he attaches to that process by which he brings to perfection a tree, a shrub, or a vegetable, he will very properly reply that their cultivation embraces a knowledge of soils, temperature, light, moisture or dryness, and the application of manures. By their aid, and the use of certain implements, he adapts means to their proper ends, because he knows their relative value. By reading, reflection, observation, and diligent practice, the mind has become prepared for the reception of the truths of vegetable physiology, and by a practical application of them to the circumstances under which the tree, shrub, or vegetable is made to grow, he cultivates them as their several necessities require. This brings perfection if it is at all attainable, and the result is based upon sound and discriminative intelligence.

There is no such thing as a royal road to perfection in arranging and planting a garden. But one would be induced to believe it an easy matter to do either, were the opinion formed upon the illustrations met with every where of the capacity and judgment of most of the gardeners employed in the United States. There are some intelligent men among the number, but the larger portion are of an inferior caste, practical workers truly, but not men of reflection, not the men who read and reason, and base their operations upon the scientific elucidations of a progressive age, pregnant in great issues to the horticulturist as well as the mechanic and professional man. We want that class of assistants in our gardening pursuits, who eschew that dogged obstinacy so inseparable from superficial knowledge. We want the men, who having come from Europe, will remember that they are in America, and that the soil and climate bear an important influence in controlling and modifying the least of their operations.