THE FLORAL WORLD 



GAEDEN GUIDE. 



MAY, 1S6 7. 



THE HOETUS FEXESTEALIS. 



IINDOW Grardens are usually supposed to consist of flower- 

 pots on window-sills, and though in that simple form 

 they may be very attractive and highly entertaining to 

 their possessors, they are but suggestions of better 

 things, which ingenuity and taste will contrive to super- 

 sede them. To our country readers, window gardens are matters of 

 small consequence ; to town readers — and there are thousands such on 

 the look-out every month for these pages — window gardening is a 

 matter of very great importance. We have adopted the term 

 " Hortus fenestralis," the garden of or belonging to the window, to 

 designate a better kind of window embellishment than either flower- 

 pots or. wire-work, and because it seemed that by the use of a new 

 term we might obtain for our remarks on the subject more attention 

 than by the somewhat abused term by which such things have been 

 hitherto known. AYe first took notice of the new mode of embel- 

 lishing windows in our journeys towards the western parts of the 

 metropolis, where there were noticeable examples of a most tasteful 

 method of enlivening the interiors of apartments, with but little 

 sacrifice of light, and with the advantage sometimes of a total ex- 

 clusion of an unseemly prospect, and perhaps administering at the 

 same time a rebuke to inquisitiveness, for it is impossible for passers 

 by to see into apartments, the windows of which are treated in the 

 mode we are now desirous of recommending to the notice of our 

 readers. Possibly many of our readers may have noticed examples of 

 what we call the Hortus fenestralis in Piccadilly and St. James's 

 Street, where there are suites of windows with small projecting glass 

 cases which at all seasons of the year are kept richly furnished. 



An essential feature of the Hortus fenestralis, is that it is in the 

 fashion of a closed case fitted to the window, extending to half its 

 height or more ; it may indeed be of the same height as the window, 

 and projecting outwards to the full extent of the sill or beyond it. 

 It is a very simple afi'air, but, like many other simple things, has been 

 but lately thought of; and as it is obviousl}- adapted to render many 

 a dreary look-out agreeable, and enlarge the sphere of horticultural 



YOL. II. — NO. Y. ^ 



