B8tf GARDEN MANAGEMENT. 



•stort as the velvet pile which decorates its drawing-room, with broad flower- 

 border, and interspersed with flower-beds, filled with old-fashioned bulbs 

 and herbaceous plants, and ribbon-grass, with just such an amount of massed 

 and bedded-out plants as show that the inhabitants, while preserving the 

 antique character of the garden, are also alive to modern improvements. 



Ii2g. There is another recollection of an ''old garden" which haunts many 

 wayworn travellers on the path of life — the garden of early youth and child- 

 hood, where they were permitted to taste the first peach of the season, or to par- 

 take of the earliest and sweetest of gooseberries or strawberries, or feast on the 

 earliest of mellow pears. Memory carries one back to such days, and to a 

 grim Cei-berus of a gardener, who kept the kej's of such a garden, inclosed 

 in walls too lofty to be scaled. But then the sweetness of those pears and 

 gooseberries and strawberries when by good luck or favour they were ob- 

 tained ! No fruits of these days have a flavour like them. And what a glow 

 ■of colour did that broad flower-border present in the glorious summer sun , 

 for even the sun has lost the brilliancy it had while the century was yet ia 

 its "teens." 



1130. But every medal has its reverse, and where one old garden brings 

 golden recollections with it, nine others tell of indolence and neglect. 

 Listen to the Rev. John Laurence, who had always had an " earnest desire to 

 have a garden," and at last, " by the pro%'idence of God and the bounty of a 

 genex'ous patron," got a rural living and a garden. "Adjoining my house, 

 when I came here," he saj^s, "I found what they called a garden, of about 

 thirty-two yards square, mounted with low mud walls, quite ovei'run with 

 couch or twitch-grass, nettles, and a few stunted gooseberry-bushes, a worn- 

 out soil, and a wet white clay within half a foot of the surface. The earnest 

 desire I always had to have a garden made me look on with grief; but j'et I 

 -instantly resolved to do something, that no time might be lost, 



1 131. "I was dissuaded by most of my neighbours, as thinking it a very 

 ^vain attempt, and that I should lose my labour and charge as othei-s had 

 ■ done. Not discouraged, however, I resolved to puU dovra the mud wall that 



faced the south-east, and to build me a brick one in its stead, nine feet high ; 

 which I did, by the help of my neighbours, the same summei\ What methods 

 I used to give myself any hopes of fruit in such a garden was made almost 



■inviid Minervd, and will appear elsewhere. I can only say here, to encourage 

 my friends, that in three years' time I began to taste the fruits of my labours, 

 and ever since I have had plenty, even greater than I could reasonably 



•expect." 



1 132. Most of our gardening friends will be familiar with another phase of 

 ** old gardens," in which the soil has been manured year after year, and 



'cropped without any system of rotation, until it has become a mass of black 

 pasty-looking eai'th, — I'ich, but altogether unsuitable for growing the ordinary 

 garden crops and fruit-trees. The truth is, the soil is choked up with undc- 

 • composed dung, which is unfitted for the food of plants ; and it has been 

 'cropped year after year with the same vegetables until it is completely divested 



