Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

September. — Bed Virginia Creeper leaves and Geranium (Henry Jacoby). Single Helianthemums and Carrot leaves of various shades. Bed Virginia Creeper leaves, Nasturtiums, and a large tray in the middle piled up with fruit — apples, pears, peaches, grapes, &c. October. — Single Dahlias and Venetian Sumach. Greenhouse Chrysanthemums. October 30th. — It is an excellent plan, if you have a very sunny window that you are glad to have shaded in o 194 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN the summer and not in winter, to put two bars of wood like a bracket out from the wall as a support for one long bar; or if your window is high, and so requires more width to shade it, have two, or even three, bars across the top. You plant on one side a Vine or a Wistaria, and train it over this kind of wooden eyebrow. If you have a Wistaria, the flowers hang through in spring ; if you have a Vine, the little bunches of grapes hang charmingly along the top of your window in autumn. In both cases the branches become quite bare at the first frost, and so your room is not shaded at a wrong time of year. I think this method of growing certain plants usually grown against walls will please many plant- loving people. I have been so often asked about London gardens, and in two cases have taken real and active interest in them — one a small square piece of ground behind an old house in Westminster; and another much larger, very near the Addison Koad Station. In all cases in and near London I say, emphatically, ' Avoid evergreens.' They get black and miserable, and look horrid, even in winter; though, if syringed and pruned, I think both Aucuba and Box, and especially the latter, might be kept clean and flourishing, and even prove useful for picking. Ivy, too, on a wall facing north is often preferable to the bare wall. I have said a great deal in August against growing Virginia Creeper and Ampelopsis veitchii, because of its spoiling and hiding beautiful old houses ; but in London, and where we want to hide, they are the most useful and, indeed, invaluable Creepers that can be planted. They have every merit, are quick growers in any soil, graceful if pruned and cared for, and yet doing well if left alone. Their growth in the spring and early summer is full of beauty, and in London they hasten to lose their leaves without colouring them. OCTOBER 195 On the back of a house my parents built in '41, in Rutland Gate, was planted, I think, the first Virginia Creeper I ever remember in London. In those days beyond this house it was all fields and nursery gardens. London was not then quite so black as it is now — not in that part, at any rate. I well remember the beauty and glory of this Virginia Creeper. It was never pruned, and hung from top to bottom of the house in lovely masses of falling foliage. Virginia Creepers, like many other things, vary a little in their growths ; one that has its leaves out early in the spring is the best for London. The Ampelopsis is prettier for being very much starved, as the leaves keep smaller, and less like the redundant growth at Boston, which I so condemned before. But on the whole, even for London, I prefer the growth of the common Virginia Creeper.