96 THE FLOEAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



AUaderensis (J. and C Lee), a hardy garden hybrid, with rich 

 orange yellow flowers, and a free robust habit ; will be invaluable for 

 peat-beds. 



The above are all we can enumerate as really good among the azaleas 

 brought before the public for the first time during the past season. Mr. 

 Todman and Messrs. Kinghorn have several promising seedlings ; the 

 best among them is Todman's Lord Canning, a pretty rose-coloured 

 variety ; which seems likely to improve, and will perhaps yet prove to be 

 first-rate. 



BANKS AND BRAES. 



I strpposE there will be no demur on the part of the reader to my 

 assertion of the doctrine that every garden should somewhere have a 

 hillock, a raised bank, or a dell. It must depend very much on the 

 size and situation of the place how much space may be devoted to 

 elevations and depressions, but in some way or other art should come to 

 the aid of nature, and a continuous dead level should be proclaimed a 

 monstrosity. If the " land o' Burns" had been like Salisbury Plain, we 

 might have missed that sweetest of good Robert's ditties — 



"Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon," 



and perhaps have never heard of Burns at all, for mountains make poets, 

 as they nourish blue gentian flowers and snowy saxifrages in their cool 

 clefts, and wild thyme and heather on their sunny foreheads. We don't 

 want mountains in gardens, but we must have hills and hollows, walks 

 that lead down, down, among mossy patches and between walls of rock and 

 sprawling cistuses and cotoneasters and tassellings of fern ; and up again 

 to round knolls of ivy, and again higher to clumps of juniper and tussock 

 grass and fringes of violet and primrose, with a bowery nook somewhere 

 for rest and a good view of the open country, to make excuse for halting. 

 I can bring Lord Bacon into court as a witness for hillocks, and Robert 

 Burns shall plead for lovers' retreats ; and, if needful, the authority of 

 Shenstone shall be added for embellishing these ups and downs with 

 "winding waters" and flowery knolls. In the great days of the pic- 

 turesque, the lovers of molehills and creeping thorns committed the very 

 common mistake of overdoing a good thing, and it was thought the acme 

 of perfection of taste in gardening to pile up rockeries near the drawing- 

 room windows, and debar entrance to the doorway by means of prostrated 

 trees, and rivulets of water, and blocks of stone raw from the quarry. 

 English gardening has now come to such a healthy state, that it is no 

 longer needful to insist that all wild scenes should be removed to a distance 

 from the dressed grounds, and that this principle should always rule in 

 laying out a place — that %ve go to the rockery and wilderness, they must 

 not come to us. So, of necessity, if there is to be a bowery nook, as there 

 ought to be, a place of repose both for the eye and the mind, it should 

 be the natural terminus of the walks that lead to it, and the eye and the 

 mind should alike be prepared for it by a gradual transition Irom archi- 

 tectural terraces, elaborate and highly colourad flower-beds, across smooth 

 lawns, through belts of shrub and among clumps of deciduous trees, the 

 scene everywhere becoming less formal than the point we started from, till 

 we are prepared to meet nature in undress, or rather in the semblance of 



