Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

48 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN collect them. Until lately I was absolutely ignorant of their existence, and had never seen an illustrated flower book of the last century. About fifteen years ago I was living in London, with apparently small prospect of ever living in the country again, or of ever possessing a garden of my own. When ' A Year in a Lancashire Garden,' by Henry A. Bright, was published in 1879, the book charmed me, and I thought it simple, unaffected, and original. I had not then seen Dr. Forbes Watson's delightful little book, ' Flowers and Gardens,' alluded to by Henry Bright. ' A Year in a Lancashire Garden ' has been much imitated, but, to my mind, none of the imitations possess the charm of the original. It is a fascinating chat about a garden to read in a town and dream over as I did. It revived in me, almost to longing, the old wish to have a garden, and I resolved, if it were ever realised, that every plant named by Henry Bright I would get and try to grow. This I literally carried out when I came to live in Surrey. His joys have been my joys, and his failures have some- times been mine too. In the ' Lancashire Garden ' I was delighted to find a sentence which exactly expresses an opinion I had long held, but never met with in words before. As I agree with it even more strongly now than I did then, it is well I should quote it here, for the evil it denounces exists still, not only in England, but even more in several countries I have visited abroad : ' For the ordinary bedding-out of ordinary gardens I have a real contempt. It is at once gaudy and monotonous. A garden is left bare for eight months in the year, that for the four hottest months there shall be a blaze of the hottest colours. The same combination of the same flowers appear wherever you go — Calceolarias, Verbenas, and Zonal Pelargoniums, with a border of Pyrethrums or Cerastiums; and that is about all. There is no MARCH 49 thought and no imagination.' Yet twenty years ago this sort of garden was like Tory politics, or Church and State, and seemed to represent all that was considered respectable and desirable. I shall never forget the bombshell I seemed to fling into a family circle when I injudiciously and vehemently said that I hated parks and bedded-out gardens. In Mr. Bright' s book I first saw the mention of Curtis's 'Botanical Magazine,' and afterwards came across a few stray illustrations out of it. Many of these old gardening books were, I fear, cut up and sold for screens and scrap-books when there was no sale for the complete works. I was much struck with the beauty and delicacy of these hand-coloured flower plates, and so began my first interest in old flower books, which has led by degrees to my present collection. At one time I thought of giving some account of the Herbals and botanical works at the library of the South Kensington Natural History Museum, where there is a very fine collection, which begins with the early Herbals and includes botany and gardening books. This, however, proved to be too ambitious a work; but a short account of my own books may be of some interest, for these, though far from being a large collection, extend over nearly three hundred years.