ENGLISH CLIMATE. 69 



and stove, seem to have realised every degree of 

 temperature from Kamskatka to Sincapore. But 

 apart from artificial means, the natural mildness of 

 our sky is most favourable to plants brought from 

 countries of either extreme of temperature ; and, as 

 their habits are better known and attended to, not 

 a year passes without acclimatising many heretofore 

 deemed too tender for the open air. Gardeners are 

 reasonably cautious in not exposing at once a newly- 

 introduced exotic ; and thus we know that when 

 Parkinson wrote, in 1629, the larch, and the laurel 

 then called bay-cherry were still protected in 

 winter. We are now daily adding to the list of our 

 hardy plants ; hydrangeas, the tree-peony, fuchsias, 

 salvias, altromaerias, and Cape-bulbs, are now found, 

 with little or no protection, to stand our mid- 

 England winters. 



Then we alone have in perfection the three main 

 elements of gardening, flowers apart, in our lawns, 

 our gravel, and our evergreens. It is the greatest 

 stretch of foreign luxury to emulate these. The 

 lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regu- 

 larly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of 

 English verdure ; and at the gardens of Versailles, 

 and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been sup- 

 plied from the Kensington gravel-pits. It is not 

 probably generally known that among our exporta- 

 tions are every year a large quantity of evergreens 

 for the markets of France and Germany, and that 

 there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged 

 in this branch of trade. This may seem the more 



