152 THE GARDENER. [April 



to bring out more distinctly the character and different tints of taller 

 and easy-growing evergreen shrubs or trees. The enclosure itself we 

 will suppose laid out in a thoroughly free-and-easy style, and would 

 banish from its precincts such a formal tracery as box-edgings, and 

 substitute those beautiful-looking Irises which exist now in nearly 

 all the colours of the rainbow ; to say nothing of the many other 

 beautiful dwarf evergreen subjects that make exquisite edgings, such 

 as hardy Heaths, Cotoneasters, Euonymus, Daphnes, Andromeda, and 

 scores of others that might easily be named, and all of which in their 

 turn might be used as carpeting for beds, in which could be planted 

 at easy distances our most symmetrical and graceful shrubs, so that 

 each could grow into their natural forms and beauty, and not be subject 

 to any such knifing or clipping as would destroy their native tendency. 

 What a bountiful amount of material do Rhododendrons furnish, from 

 the very dwarf est to the most stately objects ! How beautiful our 

 variegated golden and silver shrubs would appear at mid-winter, con- 

 trasted with the dwarfer dark-greens, and vice versa ! What a variety 

 of surface, both in colour and character, could be produced even in a 

 very small space, and that, too, while every atom of surface except 

 the walks would be instinct w^ith life and beauty the livelong year, 

 and most conspicuously so when winter has stripped other gardens of 

 their garlands, and caused many, as it were, to creep below the brown 

 earth till the following summer. With these faint hints as to what 

 w^e wish to advocate, we for the present leave the subject to our readers, 

 fully convinced that the shrub or evergreen garden is one calculated to 

 add a great charm to all gardens, when such can be called into existence. 



SETTING OF GRAPES AND PEACHES. 



Can any of your readers furnish a good reason for the necessity of keep- 

 ing Vineries and Peach-houses, for instance, unusually dry w^hile the 

 fruit is setting ; or explain how the damping of the house, or occasional 

 syringing of the trees while in bloom, is injurious *? A deeper reason 

 may probably underly the advice generally given on this jDoint in some 

 cases, but I question if the majority could supply a better than that 

 given to us many years ago, at an early period of our career, by the 

 man in charge of the Peach-houses. To the question w^hy he kept the 

 atmosphere so dry when the trees w^ere in bloom, the answer was, " Tae 

 blaw the pollen aboot, tae be sure; " and our instructor, tapping a twig 

 with his finger to make the pollen fly, showed us how, if it had been 

 wet and claggy, that it " wadna blaw aboot ava." This explanation 



