Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

June QQth. — For anyone with a small stove or warm greenhouse I can thoroughly recommend the growing of the Gloriosa superba or Creeping Lily. It is a lovely and curious flower ; it lasts very long in water, and flowers continuously for two or three months. Its culti- vation is simple enough : buy the bulbs in April, pot them up in good Lily soil (see Johnson's ' Gardener's Dic- tionary ' for this and all other greenhouse and stove cultivation of plants), start them in heat, and grow them up wires or thin branching sticks, or anything that gives them support ; water them well while growing ; and as they begin to go off after flowering, and the leaves turn yellow, dry them gradually till they have quite died down. Then lay the pots on their sides, and keep them quite dry, but in a warm temperature, till you re-pot them the following spring. The flowers are lovely — crimson and yellow, with crinkled, turned-back petals, and they wedge so well in small flat vases. In the last century the disciples of Linnaeus took great pleasure botanically in this plant, as the pistil bends at nearly right angles in a most curious way, to insert its stigma amongst the stamens ; and it is a good illustra- tion of the sex of plants. It is figured in that old book I alluded to in March of Erasmus Darwin's, called the i24 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN ' Botanic Garden,' and in the poem named ' The Loves of the Plants ' it is thus spoken of :— Proud Gloriosa led three chosen swains, The blushing captives of her virgin chains, When Time's rude hand a bark of wrinkles spread Bound her weak limbs, and silver'd o'er her head ; Three other youths her riper years engage, The flatter'd victims of her wily age. I must acknowledge that I have watched attentively a great many blooms of 'proud Gloriosa,' and have admired her immensely, but I never could see the differ- ence in the length of the stamens, or that first one set of three and then the other set of three came to maturity. I consider it quite as essential for amateurs who really care about their gardens to grow out-of-the-way plants in the greenhouse and conservatory as in the garden. Why should only just a few easily grown and eternally repeated plants, everywhere the same, be alone chosen from the wonderful and beautiful and abundant supply that Nature provides us with, while many rarer sorts, with a little care and knowledge, are quite suitable for growing under glass ? A study of Veitch's or Cannell's catalogues, and looking up the names in Johnson's ' Gardener's Dictionary,' makes a selection quite easy, even if you cannot visit any of the first-class excellent nurseries in summer, or if you do not possess any of the old illustrated books. June %7th. — For those who live in the country, or those who spend the early summer months in towns and have their flowers sent up, no family of plants are more useful than the Campanulas (all described in the ' English Flower Garden '). Perhaps the one we could least do without is the beautiful C. persicifolia. It takes little room, is a true perennial, and divides well in the autumn. In light soils it flowers better if treated as a biennial and sown in a seed bed annually, so as to have a good supply of JUNE !25