Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

tion and partly from the unsympathetic harshness of their tint. But surely in gardening, as in all else in life, the broadest view is best, and the wisest attempt is to please as many as we can. The taste of the ignorant and the critical taste of the cultivated never can be the same on any subject, but both are better than indifference and no taste at all. I know one man who dislikes any flowers, and only has stunted Portugal Laurels growing in green square boxes on his lawn. I know another who will not plant anything that does not flower or fruit in the autumn months, because that is the only time he intends to live at his country place. All tastes are respectable, though we may each of us find it difficult to admire the taste of the other. 1872. ' My Garden : Its Plan and Culture,' by Alfred Smee. Second edition, revised and corrected. This book is one I can really recommend to beginners. It is modern in illustration, and yet it retains some of the character- istics of the older books. It really teaches you what to do, and gives a very fair idea of all that a good-sized garden requires; it names and illustrates hardly any plants not worth growing; it includes kitchen garden, flower garden, Alpine garden, greenhouse, stove, and water plants ; and it winds up with garden insects, animals, and birds. The illustrations are much above the average. Those who want to buy one single book likely to help them, especially at first, could not do better than get this one, which is often to be seen mentioned in catalogues of second-hand books. 1874. ' Alpine Plants,' edited by David Wooster. This work, which is in two volumes, contains a great many colour-printed illustrations of Alpine plants — not, however, as they grow in the fissures of their mountain slopes, but as they may be seen in Mr. Backhouse's most interest- ing gardens in Yorkshire. The drawings are rather exaggerated in size and harsh in colour, but^the book is NOVEMBER 239 distinctly instructive as portraying, among what are called * Alpines,' the most showy and the best worth cultivating in English gardens. 1879. ' A Year in a Lancashire Garden,' by Henry A. Bright. This little book is the one I alluded to in March, and to which I consider I owe so much. It often gives me pleasure to read it over now. It has qualities like the garden itself. The same flowers come up each year, the same associations link themselves on to the returning flowers, and the verses of the great poets are unchanged ; so this little book will always be to me like poor Ophelia's Eosemary, ' that's remembrance.' The quotations throughout the book are quite un- usually original and appropriate.