558 THE LIBERTON MAINS NURSEliY. [Jan. 



THE LIBERTON MAINS NURSERY. 



NOWHEIJE better than when scanning the glorious hmdscape 

 from the Queen's Drive, just beyond Samson's Kibs, is the 

 visitor reminded how recent municipal extension has brought more 

 prominently into notice historic localities far apart from the erst 

 single street and surrounding closes of old Edinburgh, but inseparable 

 links in its civic story. Craigmillar Castle and Blackford Hill, 

 despite modern villas built around them, will always speak of 

 Queen Mary or King James. Citizens' trim lodges are massed close 

 in the valley towards the New City Park, which will soon be thus 

 environed ; and, indeed, the pedestrian must all too soon have to 

 travel another mile south ere he skirt the country ; Liberton appears 

 to stand even now on one of the hills constituting the special beauty 

 for situation of the northern metropolis. Yet, amidst all this 

 building extension, sylviculture has contributed a living leafy testi- 

 mony of the past, once thought by old Edinburgh residenters to be 

 amongst their buried memories associated with Craigmillar Castle, 

 Queen Mary's sycamore, as well as her thorn, have disappeared 

 during the last forty years. But young seedlings from the sycamore 

 now thrive in Liberton Mains Nursery, on the slope of that hill, 

 close to where, on its summit, stand the old Castle ruins. Mr. 

 Gladstone added fame to the system of market gardening pursued 

 on the farm, when exhortino- distressed agriculturists to begin straw- 

 berry culture. And now it has to be entered in the notabilia of the 

 arboriculturist during an Edinburgh visit, as the site of a new point 

 of departure in the progressive practice of the art, by a firm dating 

 previously to 1770. Messrs. Dicksons & Co. have added this new 

 establishment to their other nurseries at Eedbraes, Logie Green, and 

 Bonnington Farm. They have thus enhanced their old reputation 

 as educational horticulturists. Eor Loudon worked in their old 

 Leith Walk nurseries. And despite the non-establishment of the 

 Scottish Forest School, young arborists will find at Liberton what is 

 practically an experimental station, wliere, like young engineers, ere 

 cared for by University professors, they may learn by practical 

 example. 



Liberton Mains comprises nearly four hundred acres, only part of 

 which are occupied by the nursery. But this cheap rent and large 

 area allow features of arboricultural practice being expressed in a 

 larger and more effective manner than, say, at Bonnington, where 

 Edinburgh nurseries most do segregate. Seed-testing, usually con- 

 fined to a few yards, is here done in plots of several acres. One 

 such compartment of cabbages had in summer the appearance of a 



