Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

October 8th. — I have been lately on the East Coast. One cannot help being amused to find that gardening is so like life, each one has his own difficulties. I was suggesting to my friend to plant her Violets in leaf- mould, when she said : ' Why, we have not a single leaf. The few there are on the dwarf trees blow away into space.' Oh ! what a fight the poor plants have with the salt-laden winds ! But some things thrive and flourish by the sea as they do nowhere else. I think the sunk Dutch gardens, before described, will be found most useful by the seaside. October l&th. — It is a very good plan, when you want to cut a new bed or alter the shape of an old one, to shuffle along the wet dewy grass on an October morning -^and this leaves a mark which enables you very well to judge of size, shape, and proportion — before you begin to cut your beds out. I am taking up and replanting — in the way before described of massing all the plants of one colour together — my long herbaceous borders. These borders run right across what was once a fair-sized lawn, and the principle of the garden is to have it all beds and low-growing shrubs, except the paths, which are turf ; the main paths are left gravelled for the sake of dryness in bad weather. I only replant the herbaceous borders every four or five years, mulching them well every winter ; and even then it is best only to replant them partially, as certain fine plants are much injured, if not killed, by moving at all, and these plants remain as landmarks both as regards height and colour for the replanting of the borders. Keeping colours together and some empty spaces for annuals or filling up in spring or summer out of the reserve garden, makes it much easier to prevent the borders looking dull and shabby at any time during the summer months. The large square beds are planted now with all kinds 184 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN of spring-flowering things, not formally, but in broad patches — Wallflowers, Forget-me-nots, Tulips, Silene, Limnanthes douglasii (a Californian annual much loved by the bees), sowing a large patch of Love-in-the-mist and the annual Gypsophila (for early flowering, sown in September), Spanish Iris, Pinks and Carnations, Madonna Lilies, a large corner of Anemones, and another of Scabiosa caucasica (see ' English Flower Garden '), both these grown originally from seed. And as the spring flowers pass away, their places are filled up from autumn-sown plants, Snapdragons, &c., which are quite hardy when young and in the seed bed, but which get killed and injured by cold winds in the open. Let everyone read what is said in the ' English Flower Garden ' on the giant Saxifrages, Megaseas. There are several varieties, all worth growing, and they are most useful, satisfactory plants for all sorts of purposes, not nearly grown enough for covering the ground and making fine masses of low-growing foliage. To keep out weeds by planting low-growing and spreading plants is a great secret of gardens that are to have a picturesque appearance, and, in fact, be a cultivated wilderness rather than a tidy garden. October 15th. — This is the great Apple time. All the windfalls that take place in September and October we collect, and either eat or stew down into Apple jelly. It is very useful through the winter in many ways, and injured Apples never keep.