OF SHRUBS, MOSTLY EVERGREEN 41 



appeal to me. But no garden can be without the finer 

 varieties of Calluna (Hayes, of Grasmere, has a white 

 form so long and elegant in the spike as to suggest a 

 Spiraea japonica), and the various hardy species of Ereica 

 itself — camea, mackayana (lovely, if impermanent as 

 this fleeting world of false desire) — lusitanica, mediter- 

 ranea, ciliaris. This last is a rare, beautiful little native 

 from Dorset heaths, with heads of big brilliant bells. 

 Another is vagans, from Cornwall, with fine bushy spikes 

 of white. All these enjoy hot, sandy, peaty soils, and 

 have no marked love for me. Mediterranea, however, 

 thrives brilliantly, and blooms at the most improbable 

 times, while lusitanica has now formed a great tall bush 

 of five feet high or so, which makes a delightful filmy 

 shelter for Epigaea repens. And of my heaths, the most 

 precious is the Irish Bell- Heather — Daboeocia pollfolia — 

 which you will see on either side of the road as you drive 

 across the wild land between Sligo and Galway, through 

 Connemara. This is a very easy-going plant, which 

 luxuriates with me, and even more in peatier corners of 

 England, with ovate leaves and long, loose spikes of very 

 large white or rosy-purple bells, carried on stems about 

 eight inches high, and precious, like Ereica camea, in the 

 rock-garden, for its habit of blooming from early till late. 

 Under the shelter of Ereica, too, come such things as 

 Arbutus, Vaccinium, Arctostaphyhs, these two last species 

 containing one or two useful little things for the peaty 

 rock-garden, which, besides possessing no dizzy degree of 

 charm, are too hostile to my garden to earn a more 

 exhaustive notice here. 



The Gaultherias give us one big, ramping undergrowth 

 in G. shalhn, a North American unworthy of a choice 

 place ; and another most precious and elect of dwarfs in 

 tiny, rare G. tricliophylla, which you must grow in peat, 

 among stones, at the bottom of a little hollow like a 



