CHAPTER VI 



TERRACE AND GARDEN WALLS 



A GRAND old wall is a precious thing in a garden, and 

 many are the ways of treating it. If it is an ancient 

 wall of great thickness, built at a time when neither 

 was work shirked nor material stinted, even if many 

 of the joints are empty, the old stone or brick stands 

 firmly bonded, and, already two or three hundred 

 years of age, seems likely to endure well into the 

 future centuries. In such a wall wild plants will 

 already have made themselves at home, and we may 

 only have to put a little earth and a small plant into 

 some cavity, or earth and seed into a narrow open 

 joint, to be sure of a good reward. Often grasses and 

 weeds, rooting in the hollow places, can be raked out 

 and their spaces refilled with better things. When 

 wild things grow in walls they always dispose them- 

 selves in good groups ; such groups as without their 

 guidance it would have been difficult to devise inten- 

 tionally. 



So if one had to replant the old moat wall how 

 pleasant a task it would be to rake out the grasses and 

 wild Lettuce and other undesirables, saving the pretty 

 little pale lemon Hawkweed and the Ivy-leaved Toad- 

 flax and the growth of flags by the culvert, and re- 



