116 THE WILD GARDEN. 



kind. Here is a little bay, for example, with the turf running 

 into it, a handsome holly feathered to the turf forming one 

 promontory, and a spreading evergreen barberry, with its fine 

 leaves also touching the "round, forminu; the other. As the 

 turf passes in between those two it begins to be colonised 

 with little groups of the pheasant's-eye Narcissus, and soon in 

 the grass is changed into a waving meadow of these fair flowers 

 and their long grayish leaves. They carry tlie eye in among 

 the other shrubs, and perhaps carry it to some other colony 

 of a totally difl'erent plant behind — an early and beautiful 

 boragewort, say, with its bright blue flowers, also in a 

 spreading colony. Some might say. Your flowers of narcissi 

 only last a certain time ; how are you going to replace them ? 

 The answer is, that they occupy, and l)eautifully embellish, a 

 place that before was wholly naked, and worse than naked, 

 and in this position we contend that our narcissi should be 

 seen in all their stages of bud and bloom and decay without 

 being hurried out of tlie world as soon as their fair bloom is 

 over, as they are on the border or in the greenhouse. They 

 are worth growing if we only secure this one beautiful aspect 

 of vegetation where before all was worse than lost. We also 

 secure plenty of cut flowers without troubling the ordinary 

 resources of the garden. 



We might then pass on to another, of the German iris, 

 occupying not only a patch, but a whole clump ; for these 

 enormous London parks of ours have acres and acres on 

 every side of this greasy dug earth which ought to sparkle 

 with flowers; and, therefore, a very fine plant might be 

 seen to a larae extent. And how nnich better for the 

 gardener or cultivator to have to deal with one in one 



