HOME GARDENS FOR SMOKY TOWNS. 351 



of suburban "villa residences" is favorable to this and otber 

 similar radical household .reforms, as thousands of these 

 wretched tenements must sooner or later be pulled down, 

 or will all come down together without any pulling the next 

 time we experience one of those earthquake tremors which 

 visit England about once in a century. 



HOME GARDENS FOR SMOKY TOWNS. 



THE poetical philanthropists of the shepherd and shep- 

 herdess school, if any still remain, may find abundant 

 material for their doleful denunciations of modern civiliza- 

 tion on journeying among the house-tops by any of our 

 over-ground metropolitan and suburban railways, and con- 

 templating therefrom the panorama presented by a rapid 

 succession of London back yards. The sandy Sahara, and 

 the saline deserts of Central Asia, are bright and breezy, 

 rural and cheerful, compared with these foul, soot-smeared, 

 lumber- strew n areas of desolation. 



The object of this paper is to propose a remedy for these 

 metropolitan measle-spots, by converting them into gardens 

 that shall afford both pleasure and profit to all concerned. 



A very obvious mode of doing this would be to cover 

 them with glass, and thus convert them into winter gardens 

 or conservatories. The cost of this at once places it beyond 

 practical reach ; but even if the cost were disregarded, as it 

 might be in some instances, such covering in would not be 

 permissible on sanitary grounds ; for, doleful and dreary 

 as they are, the back yards of London perform one very 

 important and necessary function; they act as ventilation- 

 shafts between the house-backs of the more densely popu- 

 lated neighborhoods. 



At one time I thought of proposing the establishment of 

 horticultural home missions for promoting the dissemina- 

 tion of flower-pot shrubs in the metropolis, and of showing 

 how much the atmosphere of London would be improved 

 if every London family had one little sweetbriar bush, a 



