Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

May 16th. — None of the small cheap bulbs are better worth growing than the Alliums, white and yellow. They increase themselves rapidly, and are quite hardy, though the white ones force well and are useful. People object to them because the stalks smell of garlic at the time of picking, but it goes off as soon as they are put into water; and the flowers are lovely, delicate, and useful, and have the great merit I mention so often of remaining a long time fresh in water. We leave some of the bulbs in the ground, and take up others. Those that are taken MAY 103 up and dried in the sun flower best the following year ; and the finest bulbs can be planted together, the yellow making a fine splotch of colour just as the yellow Alyssum is over. The smaller the garden, the more essential it is to get a succession in colour. Avoid many white flowers in small gardens ; in roomy gardens with shady corners nothing looks better than the common single white and purple Eocket, raised from seed and planted in bold groups. It will grow in very dry places, but it soon gets untidy, and has to be cut back, which it does not seem to mind at all. Tiarella cordifolia (' Foam-flower,' Mr. Eobinson calls it) is a little Canadian plant which ought never to be left out of any garden. May 19th. — This is the first day of one of the great gardening interests and treats in the year — the Eoyal Horticultural Show in the Temple Gardens. I go every year now, and should be sorry to miss it. How odd it seems, that for years and years I never went to a flower show, or knew anything about them, and now they have become one of the interests of my life ! The great attraction this year is the revival of what are called old-fashioned late single Tulips — Breeders, Flames, &c. Those who like to buy the bulbs, ordering them care- fully by the catalogue, may have their gardens gay with Tulips for over two months, certainly the whole of April and May. The quantity of Apples, for so late in the season, was what struck me as almost the most remark- able thing at the show. One of the great growers told me that he had tried every conceivable plan for keeping Apples, but that nothing answered so well as laying them simply on open, well-aired shelves in a fruit-house that was kept free from frost. Trades cantia virginica (Spiderworts) are plants that do admirably in light soils, and flower two or three times 104 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN in the summer, wanting nothing beyond thinning-out and transplanting, and dividing in the autumn. The pale- blue and the white are even more beautiful than the dark- blue and the red-purple ; but they are all worth having, with their quaint-shaped flowers, so unlike other things. Every year, towards the end of May, I put in cuttings of Lavender and Eosemary. If the weather is dry, they are what gardeners call ' puddled-in,' which means that the ground is very much wetted first. In this way I have a constant supply of young plants. Eosemary is only really hardy with us if planted under the protection of large shrubs ; the keen winds of March cut them off in the open. Many other plants can be increased in the same way — early flowering shrubs such as Ribes san- guinum, the Forsythias, &c. Last spring, in Suffolk, I saw a charming little garden-hedge made of Ribes san- guinum, all one brilliant mass of its flowers.