Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

grow it who has room and a fairly good Eose soil. The long flowering branches were cut a yard or more in length. At the end of each branch was a beautiful bunch of pure, cream-white Eoses, seven or eight in number, with buds in between, and pale, healthy, green leaves down the stem. Two such branches in a narrow-necked vase, bronze or blue or dark green, are an ornament to which nothing can be added for any room, be it in a cottage or a palace. As a decoration for a large dinner-table, nothing can be better than these Eoses when they are in their prime, which, unfortunately, is but for a very short time. In the old days of bedding-out, lawns used to be cut up into beds and patterns. Now the fashion has changed, and bedding-out has become so generally condemned that most people have levelled and turfed-over the rounds, stars, crescents, and oblongs that used to enliven their lawns for a short time, at any rate, every autumn. As a result of this reaction, there are now an immense number of large, dull lawns, which as a rule slope slightly away from the house, and often to the south. They are wet in rain, and dry and brown in hot weather. They have their weekly shave with the mowing-machine, and lie baking in the sunshine. The poor plants, which would flower and do well in the open, are planted at the edges of the shrubberies, where — in a light soil, at any rate — they are robbed and starved into ugliness and failure by their stronger neighbours. There are several ways of breaking up lawns. One is by turning the lawns into grass paths, along which the machine runs easily, and making all the rest into open, informally shaped beds. These can be planted in every kind of way — in bold masses of one thing alone, or at most in mixtures of two, such as Eoses and Violas ; Azaleas and Lilies ; Carnations and more Violas, or mossy Saxifrages ; Campanulas in succession, tall and low- JULY 139 growing ; a bold group of Bamboos and Bocconia cordata ; or simply with a selection of a few low-growing shrubs ; and so on ad infinitum. Another way, and one that finds small favour with gardeners, and with considerable reason, because of the trouble of turning the mowing-machine round the plants, is to break up the lawn with sunshine- loving specimen plants — Mulberries, Savins, Sumachs, clumps of creeping Ayrshire Eoses and Honeysuckles, poles covered with claret-coloured Vines, Clematis, &c. Yet another way is to have a double pergola running all round the lawn in a square, or only down both sides, with a grass path, broad and stately, underneath the pergola. This can be made of stone or brick, oak-trees or fir-poles ; or, if wanted very light, of Japanese large Bamboos — to be got now in London, I believe. These Bamboos look best if two, three, or five are blocked to- gether unequally, with different-sized openings in between, and used as supports for fruit-trees and flowering shrubs of all kinds. As these plants grow, bamboos and wires have to be put across the top to support the creepers. In the middle is a large square of grass ; the openings are left turfed, but where the supports are put into the ground a narrow bed must be made for the plants. This enables them to be manured, chalked, watered, and generally cared for.