118 THE FLOEAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



hot diy soils they are useless ; the foliage loses its proper colour, and the 

 l)lants are eaten up with red spider; but on a cool, moist loam and in 

 damp places, where many kinds of beddcrs would he unhappy, the mimulus 

 is quite at home. When any selected hybrids are grown for bedding, 

 they may be -kept in their cutting pots till May, and then be turned out 

 and' sheltered from the sun, and kept well watered till rooted ; generally 

 the colours come much finer out of doors than imder glass, this is especially 

 the case with rmdaris, which is a charming plant for a mass, but unfor- 

 tunately fugacious. Good beds may be made of seedling plants from Feb- 

 ruary sowings, but there will be no uniformity of colouring. Florihmdus, 

 parviflorus, and moschatus make better clumps when grown in moist and 

 shady beds of peat, but the last named should be i;sed rather for its odour 

 than its colour; for however profusely it may flower, it is by no means 

 effective in a mass. It is otherwise with M. cupreus, which is one of the 

 finest bedding plants we possess. It is perfectly hardy and can be grown 

 from either seeds or cuttings, and requires precisely the same treatment 

 as Lobelia speciosa. It grows four to six inches high, and produces a per- 

 fect blaze of fiery flowers. A damp shady bed suits it best. 



THE LEAN-TO. 



Wnr.N I came to my present garden, I found myself the happy pos- 

 sessor of numerous ready-made rustic scenes. Amongst the number 

 was a ditch, and an old hedge of plum and privet forming the lower 

 boundary, where on sunny days I used to see the robins and the 

 thrushes splash about and play at washing-day, and I could any time dip 

 in a hand-net, and take up a gathering of larvae of Culcx pipiens, Libel- 

 hth'dce, 8tratiomys, Corethra, Phryganca, and other such people entangled in 

 ropes of Confervas, like antetypcs of Leotard, and quite as lively. It was 

 in every way a most beautiful ditch, as dirty, dark, and dangerous as need 

 be, and the haunt of all sorts of curious plants and animals. It has 

 always been my habit, whenever I took my walks abi'oad, to search out all 

 the ponds and ditches, in the hope of finding something rare, and here I 

 found myself with a ditch all to myself, for the third time in my life, 

 and this the best ditch of any. Of course you will understand that the 

 fall of the groimd was towards that ditch, and that its presence was a sort 

 of necessary nuisance to drain the groimd, so it was called '■^ piciKresqne 

 cum. xdilc^' and marked down in the garden map accordingly. But how 

 restless is the spirit of man. I had not made fifty dips into the lucky 

 bag, that is, into the dirty water, before I began to think it wouldn't pay 

 to keep a ditch on the premises any more than it would answer the old 

 woman whom Daniel O'Connell tormented, to harbour a polygon. We 

 wanted glass, and we wanted more growing-room, and we wanted water. 

 The ditcii always offered plenty of the last, but, ugh ! if I couldn't drink 

 it, how could the plants ? Ditch-water may do for roses and chrysan- 

 themums at the root, but to wash their heads was a business of fetch and 

 carry, so here goes, down with the hedge, and make a glorious bonfire of 

 plum and privet. Dig a well at one end, and with the stuff taken out, 

 fill up the ditch, and next put up a boarded fence to mark the boundary. 

 There happened to be close by one of those open pear trellises recom- 



