THE NURSERY 29 



the dangers of infancy is a convenience and sometimes 

 wise, but besides being very expensive, one is depriving 

 one's self of one of the most beautiful and illuminating'of 

 experiences. 



A nursery may be a pot or box of earth in a sunny 

 window, or it may be a piece of ground of any size to 

 suit the convenience and desire of the gardener, from a 

 small seed bed to a large tract of land designed to raise 

 great numbers of plants for a very large garden. As 

 striking a happy medium between these two, and an- 

 swering satisfactorily the needs of a modest garden, I 

 will describe our own nursery and its uses. It lies in 

 two exactly similar squares at the back of the walled 

 garden, and on either side of the Herb garden. A 

 Privet hedge encloses it on two sides, the low wall and 

 trellis fence of the Herb garden the third, and the high 

 wall of the flower garden on the fourth, which also pro- 

 tects it from the north and provides a sheltered situation 

 for certain tender things. On the lower section this space 

 along the wall is occupied by a small tool-house, a row of 

 covered bins to hold silver sand, coarse sand, and leaf- 

 mold, and the cold frames which are four feet deep and 

 divided into six sections. A four-foot border extends all 

 round the two nurseries and the rest is parcelled out into 

 rectangular beds three and four feet wide and of varying 

 lengths, with gravel paths between. The little beds are 

 enclosed by board edgings firmly pegged into the ground 

 at the corners and painted white, as is all the woodwork 



