CHAPTER XXXVIII. 



EXTRAVAGANT FLOWER GARDENING IN THE LONDON PARKS. 



FAR too much attention is given to tender plants which, requiring 

 great and special care, can give us only a short season of bloom. 

 This very summer of ours, between east winds and cold nights, we 

 have had weather like December ; no plants can face such a clime 

 so well as those of the northern world. There are many of that 

 region far more beautiful than the poor plants we cultivate in many 

 hothouses. 



My own Cherry Pie and the other tender summer things we have 

 worth planting are only beginning now to show their beauty towards 

 the end of the seventh month of the year, and may be nipped by 

 frost in September. Yet an English park may be full of beautiful 

 colour in February four long months before we can get the tenderlings 

 out of the house. It must be clear to any one who brings reason 

 into the subject that it is a mistake to give the greatest care to the 

 least worthy things. Look at the matter of endurance alone. If we 

 plant Oaks or American Hawthorns we may have things of value for 

 generations. Tender flowers such as Lobelias and Petunias perish 

 with the first frost, and very few of them equal in beauty things 

 happy in our climate, from the Lily to the Silvery Willow. 



The present system is a survival of bedding out of which people 

 have had more than enough, and is quite wrong for a climate like our 

 own. To carry it out a nursery of hothouses is established in each 

 park, involving much coddling, both of men and plants, for over half 

 the year. 



In recent years one of the prettiest vales in Hyde Park was 



spoiled to find room for a large nursery of hothouses, etc., with 



surrounding shrubbery, only harmful to the 



Hyde Park was beauty of the park. The French have a much 



spoiled. better way. In Paris there is a fine nursery at 



Auteuil to supply the parks of the city with plants, 



thus relieving the superintendent of each park of the care of hothouse 



plants and much work of that sort. A like one would be right for 



London and would relieve the parks of these oftentimes unsightly 



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