THE CANTERBURY BELL. 43 
foregoing observations that, instead of following in the 
wake of the blind man who made a fiddle out of his own 
head, we turn to the pages of a great old master for a code 
of instructions. In the ‘ Abridgement” of Philip Miller’s 
“Gardener’s Dictionary,” quarto, 1761, will be found the 
following :— 
“The third sort [Campanula medium] is a biennial 
plant, which perisheth soon after it hath ripened seeds. It 
grows naturally in the woods of Italy and Austria, but is 
cultivated in the English gardens, for the beauty of its 
flowers. Of this sort there are the following varieties, the 
blue, the purple, the white, the striped, and double flower- 
ing. This hath oblong, rough, hairy leaves, which are 
serrated on their edges; from the centre of these, a stiff, 
hairy, furrowed stalk arises, about two feet high, sending 
out several lateral branches, which are garnished with long, 
narrow, hairy leaves, sawed on their edges; from the 
setting on of these leaves come out the footstalks of the 
flowers, those which are on the lower part of the stalk and 
the branches being four or five inches long, diminishing 
gradually in their length upward, and thereby form a sort 
of pyramid. The flowers of this kind are very large, so 
make a fine appearance. The seeds ripen in September, 
and the plants decay soon after. 
“Tt is propagated by seeds, which must be sown in 
spring on an open bed of common earth, and when the 
plants are fit to remove, they should be transplanted into 
the. flower-nursery, in beds six inches asunder, and the 
following autumn they should be transplanted into the 
borders of the flower-garden. As these plants decay the 
second year, there should be annually young ones raised to 
sueceed them.” 
