THE HEATH GARDEN 107 



year it will be covered with a close growth of heath 

 seedlings; those of Calluna should preponderate. 

 By the autumn of the third year the mowing 

 machine may be passed over it; after that it is 

 mown once a year in October. It forms a close 

 springy turf, feeling to the foot like a Brussels 

 carpet. In August when the Calluna is in bloom 

 the effect is surprisingly beautiful. 



How well I remember that heathy path, and 

 this reminds me — I am not wandering, I hope, 

 from the heaths — of some notes in Miss Jekyll's 

 Home and Garden. They have been of much use 

 to me in my garden of sand, and, I am thankful to 

 say, of sunshine. " The natural soil of my heathy 

 hilltop is so excessively poor and sandy that it has 

 obliged me, in a way, to make a study of plants 

 that will do fairly well with the least nutriment, 

 and of all sorts of ways of meeting and overcoming 

 this serious difficulty in gardening. It is some 

 compensation that the natural products of the 

 upper ten acres of my ground — Heath and Bracken, 

 Whortleberry, fine grasses and brilliant mosses 

 below, and above them a now well-grown Copse 

 of Birch and Holly, Oak, Chestnut, and Scotch 

 Fir — are exactly what I like best in a piece of 

 rough ground ; indeed, I would scarcely exchange 



