MONTHLY SCRAPS. 



15 



Lieutenant Weber are, we believe, almost entirely indebted to this collection for 

 their scarce species of Cape and New Holland plants. 



Many other gardens which we have seen are not more interesting at this 

 time. We have not been to Messrs. Rollisons, Messrs. Chandlers, and some 

 others, but propose next month taking a more extensive round ; and we trust at 

 that more advanced period of the season to meet with much worthy of 

 description. 



The Frost— The severe frost, unequalled for severity or duration since the 

 well-remembered winter of 1813-14, has done much more damage than has been 

 recorded in the newspapers, with all their fearful catalogue of dogs and cats 

 frozen to death. The damage sustained in the various nurseries has been 

 immense. Even our hardy and acclimated evergreens, the laurel, laurustinus, 

 Portugal laurel, &c. &c, have been killed in great numbers, particularly the young 

 plants. In some nurseries nearly all the young plants are destroyed, and many 

 private gardens have lost their full-grown shrubs ; the fine green masses of which 

 will be missed in the shrubberies for many years. In Paris the cold has been 

 still more intense, but has not done much damage among the species above 

 mentioned, as their cultivation is not attempted. We are accustomed to look 

 upon France, with its vines and olives, as a generally milder climate than our 

 own ; but the fact is, that the northern division, including country far to the 

 south of Paris, though hotter in summer, is colder in winter than any part of 

 England ; so much so, that the common evergreens, which form the life and 

 beauty of our suburban gardens through many dreary months of the year, will 

 not there survive a single season without protection. This fact in some degree 

 accounts for the naked and cheerless appearance of the suburban residences of 

 the Parisians, when compared to the villas round London. Another cause is 

 perhaps the absence of turf; our beautiful plots of green, and our sloping and 

 undulating lawns, cannot be cultivated there, for they will not succeed. It has 

 failed wherever attempted, as may be easily verified by an inspection of the poor 

 mossy, rotten, patches which are the substitutes for grass plots and lawns at 

 St. Cloud and Versailles ; so that the damp, misty, foggy, atmosphere that our 

 neighbours rail at so much, has some advantages after all. We think we could 

 not give up our verdant meadows, which are scarcely ever to be met with in the 

 greater portion of France, for the finest vineyards on the banks of the Rhone or 

 the Garonne. Charles II. used to say that a gentleman might walk out more 

 days in the year in England than in any- other country of Europe, which in the 

 main is true ; yet we attach little value., to the authority of the lei esprit king ; 

 for by his own experience, he knew no other climate save that of Breda, and was 

 by no means the travelled gentleman his remark would lead us to infer. 



If however we are still discontented with our climate, let us look a little 

 further north, to St. Petersburgh for. instance, where two greenhouse rarities shown 

 to Dr. Walsh, consisted in a little pot of ivy and a ditto of holly, a little bush 

 about the size of a sixpenny myrtle. 



