SOME RESULTS. 107 
on an Indian’s blanket have to the best pictures. In fighting, some 
years later, in the various journals open to me, the battle of nature 
and variety against this saddening and blank monotony, I was oveasion- 
ally met by a ridicule of the old-fashioned mixed border which the 
bedding plants had supplanted. Now, a well-arranged and varied 
mixed border may be made one of the most beautiful of gardens ; but 
to so form it requires some knowledge of plants, as well as good taste. 
Nevertheless, the objection was just as concerned the great majority of 
mixed borders ; they were ragged, unmeaning, and even monotonous. 
I next began to consider the various ways in which hardy plants 
might be grown wholly apart from either way (the beddiug plants or 
that of the mixed border), and the wild garden, or garden formed in 
the wilderness, grove, shrubbery, copse, or rougher parts of the pleasure 
garden, was a pet idea which I afterwards threw into the form of a 
book with this name. In nearly all our yardens we have a great deal 
of surface wholly wasted—wide spaces in the shrubbery frequently 
dug over in the winter, plantations, grass-walks, hedgerows, rough 
banks, slopes, etc., which hitherto have grown only grass and weeds, 
and on these a rich garden flora may be grown. ‘Hundreds of the 
more vigorous and handsome herbaceous plants that exist will thrive 
in these places and do further good in exterminating weeds and pre- 
venting the need of digging. Every kind of surface may be embellished 
by a person with any slight knowledge of hardy plants —ditch-banks, 
gravel-pits, old trees, hedge-banks, rough, yrassy places that are never 
Inown, copses, woods, lanes, rocky or stony ground. 
The tendency has always been to suppose that a plant from 
another country than our own was a subject requiring much attention, 
not thinking that the conditions that occur in such places as men- 
tioned above, are, as a rule, quite as favourable as those that obtain 
in nature throughout the great northern regions of Europe, Asia, and 
America. Here some common plants of the woods of the Eastern 
. States are considered rarities and coddled accordingly to their destruc- 
tion. It is quite a phenomenon to see a flower on the little Yellow 
Dog’s-Tooth Violet, which I remember seeing in quantity among the 
grass in your noble Central Park. When one has but a few specimens 
of a plant, it is best no doubt to carefully watch them. But an 
exposed and carefully dug garden border is the worst place to grow 
many wood and copse plants (I mean plants that grow naturally in 
such places), and in many uncultivated spots here the American 
Dog’s-Tooth Violet would flower quite as freely as at home. Your 
