Washing Salads. 29 



served, that a grass-garden, where a number of different 

 species of grasses are arranged side by side, illustrates this 

 important point in the economy of the grasses in a clear and 

 interesting manner. It is from this property of the natural 

 grasses, connected with a combination of a considerable num- 

 ber of different species, which are always found in the most 

 rich or fattening pastures, that the great superiority of these 

 over artificial pastures, or of such as are formed of one or two 

 species only, chiefly arises ; and hence it is that the former, 

 whether formed by nature in the course of many years, or by 

 art in one, (by sowing the seeds of all the essential species, or 

 by stocking the soil at once with a sufficiency of these plants, 

 precluding , thereby the introduction of spurious grasses or 

 weeds,) are productive of a perpetual verdure and supply of 

 fresh herbage unknown in artificial pastures, consisting of one 

 or two species of plants only. 



(To be continued.) 



Art. VII. Of the best Mode of Washing Water Cresses and 

 other Salads so as to free them from the Larva? of Insects, 

 and Worms. By Mr. James Simson, Gardener, Mussel- 

 burgh, near Edinburgh. 



Sir, 



I received your letter with a prospectus of the Gardener's 

 Magazine, which work I think will be very useful to us here, 

 who know little of what is going on in the gardens about Lon- 

 don. I am sorry you did not mention some subject that you 

 wanted me to write about, as I do not know what to fix on ; 

 however, as you say you must have all your papers for the first 

 number by the end of this month, the only thing I can think 

 of is to send you some remarks on the water cresses, and other 

 winter salads, such as brooklime, scurvy grass, American 

 cress, &c. 



I understand there has been something written on the cul- 

 ture of the water cress in the transactions of the London 

 Horticultural Society. I have not seen these transactions, 

 though my master got me to cultivate the cress in consequence 

 of somebody's telling him how it was described in them. We 

 grow them in a small pond behind the melon ground in the 

 slip, and only round the margin of the pond ; but what I have 

 principally to communicate does not concern the growing but 

 the gathering. After these cresses had been served up to 

 breakfast for several weeks, it happened one morning that a 



