Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

' From the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth cen- tury it was implicitly and almost universally believed that in the western islands of Scotland certain geese, of which the nesting-places were never found, instead of being hatched from eggs, like other birds, were bred from " shell-fish " which grew on trees. Upon the shores where these geese abounded, pieces of timber and old trunks of trees covered with barnacles were often seen, which had been stranded by the sea. From between the partly opened shells of the barnacles protruded their plumose cirrhi, which in some degree resemble the feathers of a bird. Hence arose the belief that they con- tained real birds. The fishermen persuaded themselves that these birds within the shells were the geese whose origin they had been previously unable to discover, and that they were thus bred, instead of being hatched, like other birds, from eggs.' Mr. Lee states that the old botanist Gerarde had, in 1597, the audacity to assert that he had witnessed the transformation of the shell-fish into geese. What Gerarde states, as I read it, is that some- thing like a bird fell out of the shell into the sea, ' where it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a fowle bigger than a mallard and lesser than a goose.' He distinctly says that if it fell on the ground it died. The drawing of the plants throughout Gerarde' s book is more delicate and finished than in Parkinson's. 1691. I have a little gardener's almanack of this date. My copy is the '8th edition, and has many useful additions.' This book is without illustrations except for a frontispiece of a young man and young woman admiring a garden through a doorway. The woman is attended by a page, who is holding a modern-looking sun- MARCH 59 shade. This is curious, as umbrellas did not, I believe, come into general use till very much later. 1693. Evelyn publishes his translation of * The Corn- pleat Gard'ner, written by the famous Monsieur de la Quintinye, Chief Director of all the Gardens of the French King.' They must have been wonderful gardens, those of Louis XIV. ; and one of the most beautiful hand- coloured flower books in the library of the museum at South Kensington was executed by order of the king for Madame de Montespan. This translation of Evelyn's has some interesting little illustrations of gardens, plans of beds, fruit-trees, pruning, &c. The frontispiece is a portrait of Evelyn in a hideous wig of the day. 1710. I have an English Herbal by William Salmon, doctor to Queen Anne. It contains a most fulsome dedication to the queen. The type of man who even in that century was capable of publishing such an effusion would be very likely, I think, to have caused the death of all Queen Anne's children, while quite convinced all the time that they died solely by the will of Almighty God. What a curious person that Queen Anne must have been, who allowed the great category of persecuting laws against the Catholics in Ireland to be framed in her reign, and whom Horace Walpole called * Goody Anne, the wet- nurse of the Church ' ! The book is purely medical, and is supposed to be principally written for the use of doctors, but it describes flowering garden plants as well as the wild ones. It has a large, coarsely executed frontispiece, mostly torn out in my copy.