Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

1894. 'The Natural History of Plants,' from the German of Anton Kerner von Marilaun, Professor of Botany in the University of Vienna, by F. W. Oliver Quain, Professor of Botany in University College, London. For the modern botanist this book is deeply interesting. I am, alas ! no botanist, and have no scientific knowledge ; but to take up the book, and to read a page or two anywhere, opens one's eyes wide with wonder. It refers principally to microscopic botany. The coloured plates are saddening to a degree ; they seem to me all that botanical plates ought not to be, and somehow appear to have been affected by Miss North's system of flower-painting. How valuable would have been her untiring energy, if the drawings so generously given to Kew had been either artistic, like Mr. Parsons', or, still better, from the scientific point of view, botanical and delicately true, like Jacquin's or Bedout6's, or the drawings in Curtis's books ! In the chromo-lithographs of these four volumes we have attempts at the impossible — large plants in the foreground, with skies, distances, and middle- distance all out of tone. The wood-cuts are much better ; some are very good and delicate, especially the representations of strongly magnified subjects. I bought the book as bringing illustrated plant-lore down to the latest date. The account, in the third volume, of the dis- tribution of pollen is .thriUingly interesting, and is within the comprehension of the aforenamed ' village idiot ' ; many of our ordinary garden flowers are figured as ex- amples. The saddest attempt at a picture is a Brobding- nagian representation of an Alpine Bhododendron, with pines and snow-clad mountains in the distance. I may be wrong, but to me it seems waste of talent and time NOVEMBER 245 and money to illustrate books in this way. These illustrations are printed in Germany ; let us hope that the artists were also Germans. 1895. ' In a Gloucestershire Garden,' by Henry Ellacombe. I think most people who are personally interested in their gardens will enjoy this book ; there is much to be learnt from it, and the second part is especially instructive. It breathes the true spirit of a garden, independently of the human element or of book-making. Canon Ellacombe names many of the old Eoses, now gone out of fashion, but I rather doubt if he has ever seen Eedoute's wonderful Eose book. He ends his book with a warning to the clergy against gardening, as being too interesting and too absorbing an occupation for them. I can thoroughly echo this sentiment as a warning to all young people. It can only be perfectly indulged in by the lonely or the old, and by those who do not mind neglecting their other duties, and who say, bravely and honestly, ' I am quite selfish and quite happy.' But of course this is the danger of all absorbing pursuits. I agree with many of Canon Ellacombe's remarks ; one especially can never be too often repeated : — ' In nothing is the gardener's skill more shown than in the judicious use of the pruning-knife.' His experience of the American Bramble is exactly mine — as far as the fruit goes ; it is not worth growing, as the fruit is less in quantity and inferior in quality to our own wild Brambles. But the cut leaf is prettier, and at any rate makes a variety.