PART I.] CULTURAL 45 



hollow wall and a variety of plants may give us a good result, 

 the principal being to get our mass of soil in the centre of the 

 wall, and make it very firm, but so that rain will refresh it. It 

 is clear such a wall might take the place of the dividing lines 

 we often have in gardens, separating different gardens or plots, 

 and the following is a case in which such a wall was made, 

 with good results. 



"We are told that Solomon knew all 'green things,' from 

 the Cedar of Lebanon to the Hyssop which sprang from the 

 wall, and there is no doubt that wall gardening began soon 

 after walls themselves were made. The beautiful wall garden 

 which Nature had made on the ruins of the Colosseum is now 

 destroyed, but the Wallflowers and Catchfly yet linger on the 

 sunny castle rock at Nottingham, and the ruins at Conway are 

 a study every summer, so beautiful is the Centranthus, which 

 sows itself among the stones. At Dinan the top of an old 

 entrance doorway is draped with Ferns and weeds, with 

 delicately poised Bellflowers and Yarrow-heads, white as the 

 sea foam. Wherever old walls or ruins exist in gardens or 

 pleasure-grounds, it is easy to beautify them by sowing seeds 

 of the many beautiful flowers which luxuriate in such positions. 

 Wallflowers, Snapdragons, Erinus, and some species of Dianthus 

 grow perfectly well, naturalise themselves, in fact, on sunny 

 walls, while on shady damp ones many Ferns grow equally 

 well, often better on a wall than elsewhere. A good plan to 

 get Ferns to grow on a damp, shady, old wall is to wash off the 

 spores from Asplenium, Scolopendriums, Ceterach, and Wall 

 Eue, into a pail of tepid water, which may then be dispersed 

 over the wall by means of a syringe. It is something for us 

 to know that a broken stone or the crumbling edge of a brick 

 may nourish in sunshine flower beauty of the highest, or that 

 in shade it may yield us feathery drapery of tenderest Fern 

 fronds. A rough stone-topped wall may become a garden of 

 Sedum, Saxifrage, Erinus, both purple and white, and of many 

 other rock plants. There are some mountain plants that never 

 grow better or look more beautiful than when grown on rough- 

 topped walls or in the interstices of stony edgings. The Erinus 



