Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

This is quite worth trying ; its success would depend on its being sharply pruned back the moment after flowering and before its seeds ripen. If your cuttings take, you can make your hedge in October. It is rather a repetition of the well-known and often-seen Sweetbriar hedge, which is all the better in a light soil for cutting back the young growths in July as well as for the spring pruning. It is a very good plan this month to take off some of the shoots — apt to be too numerous — that sprout on the pruned-back creepers, such as White Jasmine, Vines of all kinds, and Bignonia radicans, which handsome old garden favourite buds so late that the flowers do not expand unless treated in this way. May 2%nd. — Not the smallest and dryest garden should be without Stachys lanata, a white woolly leaved plant, called Eabbit's Ears by cottage children, and particularly attractive to some people, who through life retain the love of a child for something woolly and soft. Certain MAY T°5 characteristics are always reminding us, especially in some women, even when old, that they were once child- ren. These leaves were formerly used as edgings to beds in a very objectionable way ; but when grown in large clumps, they are most useful for picking. When cut, they go on growing in water, as Buttercups and Forget-me- nots do, and mix very well with many flowers, especially with Narcissus poeticus, any of the German Irises, and the lovely white Scilla campanulata, a cheap bulb, of which we can hardly have too many. There is a blue and a pink kind, but the white is the most lovely ; and, in my opinion, all three are better worth growing than the usual Hyacinths, double or single. I think the people who live in the country in spring would find it more satisfactory to grow their greenhouse bulbs in large, open pans, several together, and covered with some of the mossy Saxifrages, than the usual two or three in a pot that gardeners are so fond of. If the pan has no hole at the bottom for drainage, you must put in lots of crocks, and be careful not to over-water; but bulbs like their roots moist. I made a curious experiment with the little double Prunus. One moved last autumn, and one moved last spring out of the nursery into a sunny, sheltered border, are both covered with bloom, and lovely objects. Another plant, which was left in a sunny border for a year, has no bloom on it at all, though it is quite healthy. This is one more proof of how much is to be done with reserve gardens and moving in this light dry soil. Next month I shall choose a wet day, and move them all back again into the nursery. The white Dog-tooth Violet and the various Fritillarias are very satisfactory things. They like shade and a certain amount of moist- ure, but it is not necessary for their cultivation; they will grow anywhere. The common Saxifraga, London io6 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN Pride, is a most desirable, useful plant ; it is the better for dividing every two years. It travels well picked, and is so pretty and decorative in water ; it looks well with large red Oriental Poppies, with no green at all. Silene, too, looks well with it in small glasses, for a change.