118 THE WILD GARDEN. 
larger area. More intelligence would certainly be required. 
Any ignorant man can dig around and mutilate a shrub and 
chop up a white lily if he meets it! But any person taught to 
distinguish between our coarse native weeds and the beauti- 
ful plants we want to establish, passing round now and then, 
would keep all safe. 
On a large scale, in the London parks, such a plan would, 
be impossible to carry out without a nursery garden; that is 
to say, the things wanted should be in such abundance, that 
making the features of the kind we suggest would be easy 
to the superintendent. The acres and acres of black surface 
should themselves afford here and there a little ground 
where the many hardy plants adapted for this kind of garden- 
ing might be placed and increased. This, supposing that a 
real want of the public gardens of London—a large and well- 
managed nursery in the pure air—is never carried out: the 
wastefulness of buying everything they want—-even the 
commonest things—is a costly drawback to our London 
public gardens. At the very least we should have 100 
acres of nursery gardens for the planting and replanting of 
the London parks. So, too, there ought to be intelligent 
labour to carry out this artistic planting; and with the now- 
awakened taste for some variety in the garden, one cannot 
doubt that a few years will give us a race of intelligent 
young men, who know a little of the plants that grow in 
northern countries, and whose mental vision is not begun 
and ended by the ribbon border. 
The treatment of the margin of the shrubbery is a very 
important point here. At present it is stiff—the shrubs cut 
in or the trees cut in, and an unsightly border running 
