Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

December 5th. — For anyone with a small stove I can thoroughly advise growing some of the more easily cultivated Orchids. For many years all Orchids seemed to me to smell of money, and to represent great expendi- ture ; but this is not the case at all. They only want the treatment suited to them, and the same care and atten- tion required by other plants that are grown in heat. Cypripediums come in most usefully at this time of year ; they last well in water, and continue to flower at times all through the winter. Ther,e are endless varieties of them to be bought, and some of the least expensive plants are often as good as the costly ones ; it is only the new varieties that are dear. Some that I have — green, spotted with brown, and with clear white tips — are lovely. They have looked well lately on the dinner-table, arranged with little branches of a shrubby Veronica, called, I believe, V. speciosum. It is a plant well worth growing for the charming light green of its leaves out of doors at this time of year, when fresh green is so rare. Unlike most of the shrubby Veronicas, it lasts well in water. It has a long white flower in July, which is not especially pretty. We also grow very suc- cessfully Dendrobium nobile, Oncidium sphacelatum, and 250 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN several other Orchids that flower in the early part of the year. To-day there have come up from the country — not from my own home, which is too dry, but from near Salisbury — some branches cut from an old Thorn or Apple tree, and covered with long hoary-grey moss. I have put them into an old ginger- jar without water, and in this way they will last through the winter. They stand now against a red wall, where they look exceedingly well. December 10th. — There has been in this year's 1 Guardian ' a succession of monthly papers on a Surrey garden, written by Miss Jekyll of Munstead Wood, Godalming. I give her address, as she now sells her surplus plants, all more or less suited to light soils, to the management of which she has for many years past given special attention. These papers have much illuminating matter in them, and are called ' Notes from Garden and Woodland.' All the plants and flowers about which Miss Jekyll writes she actually grows on the top of her Surrey hill. Her garden is a most instructive one, and encouraging too. She has gone through the stage, so common to all ambitious and enthusiastic amateurs, of trying to grow everything, and of often wasting much precious room in growing inferior plants, or plants which, even though they may be worth growing in themselves, are yet not worth the care and feeding which a light soil necessitates if they are to be successful. This, to me, rather delightful characteristic of ama- teurs in every art was severely condemned by Mr. Euskin in my youth, when he said that the amateur sketcher always attempted to draw the panorama of Rome on his thumb-nail, instead of humbly trying to reproduce what was at his own door. The practice is just aa common in gardening as in music and painting. DECEMBER 251 Every plant that Miss Jekyll names is worth getting and growing in gardens that are of considerable size, and which more or less share her Surrey soil and climate. I trust that before long these articles will be republished in book form, for every word in them deserves attention and consideration.