118 THE WILD GARDEN. 



larger area. More intelligence would certainly be required. 

 Any ignorant man can dig around and mutilate a shrub and 

 cliop up a white lily if he meets it ! But any person tauglit to 

 distinguish between our coarse native weeds and the beauti- 

 ful plants we want to establish, passing round now and then, 

 would keep all safe. 



On a large scale, in the London parks, such a plan wouhl, 

 be impossible to carry out without a nursery garden ; that is 

 to say, the things wanted should be in such abundance, that 

 making the features of the kind we suggest would be easy 

 to the superintendent. The acres and acres of black surface 

 should themselves afford here and tliere a little ground 

 where the many hardy plants adapted for this kind of garden- 

 ing might be placed and increased. This, supposing that a 

 real want of the public gardens of London — a large and well- 

 managed nursery in the pure air — is never carried out : the 

 wastefulness of buying everything they want — even the 

 commonest things — is a costly drawback to our London 

 public gardens. At the very least we should have 100 

 acres of nursery gardens for the planting and replanting of 

 the London parks. So, too, there ought to be intelligent 

 labour to carry out this artistic planting; and with the now- 

 awakened taste for some variety in the garden, one cannot 

 doubt that a few years will give us a race of intelligent 

 young men, who know a little of the plants that grow in 

 northern countries, and whose mental vision is not begun 

 and ended by the ribbon border. 



The treatment of the margin of the shrubbery is a very 

 important point here. At present it is stiff — the shrubs cut 

 in or tlie trees cut in, and an unsightly border running 



