OCTOBER 171 



monotony, was never dismal ; but dismal effect is 

 inevitable if the present tendency gains ground towards 

 treating hardy perennials with the formality appropriate 

 to tender subjects used only for summer decoration. 



Nay, but dismal is not the right epithet for the scene 

 which I surveyed one fine autumn afternoon in a 

 remarkable garden on the grand scale in the north of 

 Scotland. If colour be the chief aim in the cultivation 

 of flowers, here it was affluent in the highest degree, 

 and the ground lent itself to enhance the effect, falling 

 in a gentle slope on either side of a rivulet winding for 

 a couple of hundred yards down the centre of a walled 

 enclosure. Broad margins of turf, scrupulously shaven, 

 lay between the stream and magnificent herbaceous 

 borders planted with great blocks of aster, antirrhinum, 

 penstemon, helianthus, phlox, galtonia, wolfsbane, etc. 

 One block was composed of thirty or forty plants of the 

 choice Thalictrum dipterocarpum. It was a master- 

 piece of cultivation, and the pictorial effect was cer- 

 tainly splendid ; and as I gazed down upon the brilliant 

 glade I thought how scrappy and spotty my own jumble 

 of shrubs and plants must seem to any visitor. 



Yet there was something in the scene short of satis- 

 fying. Comparison may be odious, but it is inevitable ; 

 nor could I help comparing the impression received in 

 this spacious demesne with remembrance of prowls 

 within the far narrower bounds of, say, the garden of 

 Bitton Vicarage in the late Canon Ellacombe's time, 

 where every shrub had its story, every herb its indi- 

 vidual interest. I may be told, probably with truth, 

 that botanical pedantry is the source of this sentiment, 

 and, not with truth, that had the dear old Canon pos- 



