THE 



GABBSH GUISE. 



<? I ^ 



April, 18G1. 

 BEDDING GENERALLY, AND BEDDING FASHIONS 



OE 1864. 



HE Eloral "World has endeavoured to keep its 

 readers au fait in all the details of the bedding 

 system, and in this its seventh year it has to pro- 

 nounce for the seventh time that gardens are not 

 made for bedders, though bedders are undoubtedly 

 made for gardens. We never had but one quarrel with 

 the bedding system, though some of our contemporaries 

 have had a thousand. And in spite of the quarrel, we never 

 ceased to oifer suggestions for improving the established routine of using 

 bedders, and of adapting the most luxurious notions of bedding to the 

 purses of practitioners, whose taste and ambition were likely sometimes to 

 outrun their means. The quarrel we had with the bedders was of this 

 kind, that in thousands of private gardens they absorbed all the gar- 

 dener's time, all the master's money, all the attention and admiration 

 of the guests ; and in return for this wholesale and general absorption, 

 gave a display of colour during only four or five months of the year, 

 and that very often the same every succeeding year; so much scarlet, 

 blue, white, and yellow, like the wearing of a court costume in business 

 hours, until its very sameness and commonness becomes a joke. The 

 consequence of the usurpation by the bedders lias been the deterioration 

 of horticulture, in some respects, among the class to whom it offers the 

 greatest hope of pleasure and profit ; namely, the amateurs who 

 generally keep only one gardener, or who perform all the light and 

 amusing operations in their gardens with their own hands. Prohibit 

 these from using bedding plants, and forthwith they will begin to restore 

 to the neglected borders the noble clumps of fragrant white lilies, the 

 patches of Christmas rose, winter aconite, double daisy, polyanthus, 

 primula, Solomon's seal, Indian pink, potentilla, and the thousand other 

 interesting subjects which make no blaze at any season, but are con- 

 stantly presenting beautiful forms and cheerful colours, and offering 

 vol. vii, — xo. IV. E 



