2 8o MORE POT-POURRI 



ground-covering ; for instance, under a Lilac bush or any 

 deciduous shrub. This kind of spring gardening is only 

 trouble, not expense, as all these plants divide into any 

 numbers after flowering, and take away the bare look of a 

 spring garden on light soils. When the leaves are out, 

 the place they are in wants nothing and would grow 

 nothing else. In fact, in these kinds of gardens the more 

 the earth can be kept clothed and covered with light- 

 rooting dwarf plants the better, as it saves weeding 

 always such a terrible business. 



Nothing, I think, tempts me so much to neglect all 

 duties and to forget all ties as gardening in early spring 

 weather. Everything is of such great importance, and 

 the rush of work that one feels ought to be done without 

 a moment's delay makes it, to me at least, feel the most 

 necessary thing in life. A friend wrote to me once : ' The 

 best thing in old age is to care for nothing but Nature, 

 our real old mother, who will never desert us, and who 

 opens her arms to us every spring and summer again, 

 warm and young as ever, till at last we lie dead in her 

 breast.' 



And another wrote : * Serenity, serenity, serenity and 

 light ! Surely this is the atmosphere of Olympus ; and if 

 we cannot attain to it in age, in vain has our youth gone 

 through the passionate toil and struggle of its upward 

 journey to the divine summits.' 



These thoughts fit better the solitude of bursting 

 woods in the real country than the cultivating mania in a 

 small garden, where we are all tempted to fight against 

 Erasmus's assertion : ' One piece of ground will not hold 

 all sorts of plants.' 



A great deal of pleasure is to be got by striking 

 cuttings of Oleanders in heat, and growing them on in a 

 stove or greenhouse till the small plant flowers. I saw 

 the other day a cutting of double pink Oleander struck last 



