A FRAGMENT. E. V. B. 



IN answer to your letter asking "What is the difference Climate 

 between an English and a Scotch garden ? " I think there is an( J Soil 



none, save perhaps the difference that naturally follows where o f Scotland 

 there is a great difference of climate, and where the soil also 

 differs. As a rule a garden in Scotland, in the North especially, 

 endures far severer cold, and receives a far larger amount of 

 moisture from more frequent rains, while the sun when it 

 shines is fully as powerful as in the South. 



In gardens, I believe, as in the open country, the granite 

 in some way mixes freely with the soil, and it is this that so 

 strongly affects the colour and encourages the vigorous growth 

 of flowers of the garden and the field in Scotland. 



I would fain endeavour to describe one, if one only, of her 

 more famous gardens. But I have seen none of them for so 

 many years that I should hardly venture to attempt it. The 

 exquisite brilliancy of the St Andrew's Cross of the gardens of 

 Drummond Castle seen from the upper terrace visions of 

 Dunkeld with its green miles of turf and wild foaming burn, 

 and the little temple or summer-house built upon a bridge mid- 

 way across, with its dizzy ceiling of mirrors so contrived that, 

 looking up, one saw the whirl of eddying waters above one's 

 head, while half-dazed with the rattling roar underfoot ; and 

 then the Minster garden of the Macintosh at Craigmore in 

 Inverness as strange as it is beautiful, being laid out 

 in the form of the Plan of the Cathedral of York, pre- 

 cisely on the same lines according to measurement. Green 



37 



