From time to time you encountered tufts of trees closely planted, and
that cast as brown a shade as the thickest forest. These were partly
composed of wood of the most pliant texture, the extremities of whose
branches, bending to the earth, took root a second time in her bosom.
Elsewhere the rasberry [sic], the rose, the lilac, and a thousand
flowering shrubs, appeared in thickets without either regularity or
symmetry, and contributed at once to adorn, and to give an air of
rudeness and wildness to the prospect. Round the body of the trees,
planted some at their root, and some upon the different parts of the
trunk, crept the withy, the snakeweed, the ivy, and the hop, and
intermingled with them the jessamine and the honeysuckle, in the most
unbounded profusion. Their tendrils hung from the branches, and waved to
the wind; and suggested to you the appearance of garlands scattered from
tree to tree by the nymphs of the grove. All was inexpressible
luxuriance, and a thousand different shades of verdure were placed, one
upon another, in regular confusion, and attractive disorder. An
exuberance of this sort was calculated in a vulgar scene to have checked
the fertility of the plants, and to have given a sickly and withered
appearance to their productions; but it was not so in the garden of
Rodogune.
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