Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

Oh, how useful and beautiful are the tall yellow and the tall white Snapdragons ! They can be played with in so many ways : potted up in the autumn, grown and flowered in a greenhouse, cut back and planted out in the spring to flower again, admirable to send away ; in fact, they have endless merits, and in a large clump in front of some dark corner or shrub they look very handsome indeed. They are lovely picked and on the dinner-table, especially the yellow Snapdragons, but, like many other things, they just want a little care and cultivation, which they often do not get ; and they ought to be sown every April, and JULY 135 again in July. The smaller the garden, the more essential are these plants for people who like having flowers to pick ; but I warn everyone against those terrible inventions of seedsmen, the Dwarf Antirrhinums ; they have all the attributes of a dwarf, and are impish and ugly. The flower is far too large for the stalk, and they are, to my mind, entirely without merit. July is the time I take up both the English and the Spanish Irises, which makes them do ever so much better. The English Irises are best planted again at once, only taking off the small bulbs. The Spanish Irises are best dried in the sun and replanted in September. In both cases the small bulbs are planted in rows in the kitchen garden ; they take up little room, and in this way the stock is increased. In our soil, unless treated in this way, they dwindle, cease flowering, and ultimately disappear. I lost many from not knowing this in my early gardening days, when I was certainly green in judgment. The Spanish Iris likes a dry place in full sun ; the English Iris does best in half-shade, and likes moisture if it can get it, but flowers well without; the leaves are what suffer most from dryness — long, succulent, moisture- loving things that they are. July 17th. — We have had a most unusually hot dry summer, and to go into the garden is absolute pain to me, for all the trouble and labour of the year seem more or less wasted. Plants are miserably forced into bloom, to go off almost immediately ; and it is little consolation to know a week's rain will make many plants beautiful again, for the especial beauty of early summer is over. July and August are always trying months here. The soil is so very light, and one must pay the penalty ; even the heavy soils, I am told, are suffering much this year. One ought, too, to study with great interest and take 136 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN note of what survives, and even does better in these very dry years. That handsome, rather coarse-growing perennial, Buphthalmwri cordifolium, now called Telekia speciosa — as if one such name were not enough for a stout-growing composite — looked shrivelled and unhappy last month, but it has flowered better than usual, and it is a handsome plant. The pretty feathery Gypsophila paniculata never suffers from dryness, it has such a splendid big tap-root. The Gaillardias, moved from the seed bed in spring, have done very well in full sun.