Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

Bright praises very much the Primula japonica, and nothing can be more charming and unusual than the whorled growth of its flower-stems. He calls the blossoms crimson ; I call them dark magenta — at any rate, they have that purple tinge which spoils so many reds. Where they really look well is in a moist ditch or on the damp half- shaded edge of a wood. If the ground is prepared for them, and the white kind planted too, they sow themselves in endless variety of tone from dark to light ; but they are not especially suited for beds or mixing with other 90 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN plants, and from their colour are not worth growing in pots. All round the top of the hole described above is a raised bed, left irregular in places from the thro wing-up of the earth that was dug out. The whole thing is on a very small scale in my garden, but it partakes slightly of the nature of the rockeries at Kew, which anyone interested in this kind of gardening can see, and by seeing learn. The great point of making a rockery is to have large mounds of good earth, and then lay stones on them, making terraces and little flat beds, stoned over to retain the moisture and prevent the earth being washed away. The old idea was to have stumps of trees or mounds of stones and brick, and then fill in the interstices with earth. This is no good at all ; the plants have no depth of earth, and perish. The trouble of such gardening consists only in the constant hand-weeding that it requires. This must be done by someone more or less experienced, as very often the most precious plant looks like a small weed, while in other cases many planted things are no better than weeds if left alone, and quickly choke and destroy all their less vigorous neighbours. Weeding ! What it means to us all ! The worry of seeing the weeds, the labour of taking them up, the way they flourish at busy times, and the dangers that come from zeal without knowledge ! When we first went to live in the country, an affectionate member of the family, who hates weeds and untidiness of all kinds, set to work to tear up ruthlessly every annual that had been sown, and with pride said, ' At any rate, I have cleared that bit of ground.' Weeding, if tiring, is also a fascinating employment ; and so is spudding. The first is best done in dry weather, the second in moist. I am all for reducing lawns and turf, except for paths, in small gardens ; but what there is of grass should be well kept, and free from MAY 91 weeds. A quantity of daisies showing up their white faces, though pretty in theory, are in fact very unbecom- ing to the borders on a sunshiny summer's day.