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THE PLOWEE GABDEK, 



beginning to flower. A professional gardener will take 

 charge of your boxes, and return them stocked with 

 healthier plants than you can raise at home. Violets, 

 pansies, primroses, polyanthuses, anemones, heaths, and 

 double daisies, do not bloom well " in populous cities 

 pent," although they may not quite give up the ghost, 

 Thrift, with its pink blossoms, and London Pride, with its 

 pretty rosettes of leaves, are wonderfully hard to kill. 

 The Lily of the Valley will often come up, spread, and 

 blossom, year after year ; so will its cousins, the Solo- 

 mon's Seals. In not too choked town situations, an 

 interesting branch of gardening may be practised on roofs 

 and the tops of walls, by covering them with stonecrops, 

 or Sedums, white and yellow, Houseleek, wall-flowers, 

 Antirrhinums, both upright and pendulous, orpines, 

 irises, and where continuance of shade is long, with 

 mosses, polypody, wall-rue, cup-moss, and other elegant 

 cryptogamous plants. Even trees will grow on the tops 

 of walls (if the seed can drop into a convenient chink) , 

 as the Common Ash and the Mountain Ash, 



A difficulty in town gardens is to keep things from 

 being wire-drawn, from running up tall with all their 

 leaves at the top and the lower part of their stems naked, 

 and from stretching out their branches, weak and droop- 

 ing, to the right and left. "Want of light and air, after 

 which the plants are stretching, is the cause of this lank 

 and difluse habit of growth ; but the more it is allowed 

 to go on unchecked, the worse the evil will become. The 

 remedy is, careful and constant pruning, both of the 

 spring and the summer shoots, so as to keep the shrub or 

 tree as dense and compact as possible. Unfortunately, 

 primings which improve the mass of foliage also diminish 

 the quantity of flowers. In towns, many laburnums, 

 lilacs, Guelder roses, thorns, and almond-trees, which 

 would bloom respectably if allowed to run on and on. 

 flower not at all if they are cut close back. The fact is 

 the result of the situation, and a sacrifice of some kind 

 must be made. Isolated trees and shrubs, instead of 

 being planted in clumps, are less liable to spindling in 



