64 TOWN AND WINDOW GARDENING 



up their creamy balls, the White May and the rose-pink 

 Double Thorn — all these are as common along the road as 

 are the nursery-maids and perambulators upon the side- 

 walks and pavements. If our survey had been taken 

 either earlier or a good deal later in the year, so far as the 

 season would allow, the outlook would have been just as 

 pleasing. We should have seen the Fire-thorn's splendid 

 red, the Cotoneaster's softer crimson, the gold flowers 

 of the Winter Jasmine, the bare-branched Almond trees 

 kindled with rosy fire, or brick walls blazoned with yellow 

 blooms of February's Forsythia, above borders brimming 

 with the gallant Crocus. The people who live in the 

 houses behind these fore-courts (if we may not call them 

 gardens) are not very rich perhaps, but may be educated 

 folk of taste and culture, doing their best to make beauti- 

 ful their surroundings, though often but birds of passage 

 who look forward to a time not far away, when the little 

 home will be left for larger borders. Many are presided 

 over by the wives of barristers and other men of business 

 or of law, who prefer renting a small house away from 

 town to living in the whirl •and dust of London ; or 

 sometimes by the widows and daughters of country 

 clergymen, who do not possess too much of this world's 

 goods, but cannot exist without some of their former 

 favourites growing around them in their new suburban 

 homes. 



We are so much accustomed to the scenes 1 have 

 described that we do not take much heed of them ; they 

 are a matter of course, but they do surprise the stranger 

 that is within our gates. People I have met abroad, both 

 in Germany and Switzerland, have told me that one of 

 the things that struck them most in England was the 

 beauty of London's outskirts, owing largely to the little 

 gardens before each private house. We must hope the 

 fashionable flat will not rob us wholly of this charm. 



Whenever I see a pretty front suburban garden, a wild 



