116 THE WILD GARDEN. 
kind. Here isa little bay, for example, with the turf running 
into it, a handsome holly feathered to the turf forming one 
promontory, and a spreading evergreen barberry, with its fine 
leaves also touching the ground, forming the other. As the 
turf passes in between those two it begins to be colonised 
with little groups of the pheasant’s-eye Narcissus, and soon in 
the grass is changed into a waving meadow of these fair flowers 
and their long grayish leaves. They carry the eye in among 
the other shrubs, and perhaps carry it to some other colony 
of a totally different plant behind—an early and beautiful 
boragewort, say, with its bright blue flowers, also in a 
spreading colony. Some might say, Your flowers of narcissi 
only last a certain time; how are you going to replace them ? 
The answer is, that they occupy, and beautifully embellish, a 
place that before was wholly naked, and worse than naked, 
and in this position we contend that our narcissi should be 
seen in all their stages of bud and bloom and decay without 
being hurried out of the world as soon as their fair bloom is 
over, as they are on the border or in the greenhouse. They 
are worth growing if we only secure this one beautiful aspect 
of vegetation where before all was worse than lost. We also 
secure plenty of cut flowers without troubling the ordinary 
resources of the garden, 
We might then pass on to another, of the German itis, 
occupying not only a patch, but a whole clump; for these 
enormous London parks of ours have acres and acres on 
every side of this greasy dug earth which ought to sparkle 
with flowers; and, therefore, a very fine plant might be 
seen to a large extent. And how much better for the 
gardener or cultivator to have to deal with one in one 
