280 "REFORM IN THE CONSERVATOUY. 



Roast-beef plant — Iris foetidissima — may be seen occasionally 

 used with good effect. We mostly use hot-country plants 

 if we want those that live long in our dwelling rooms, 

 but this is a true hardy native which well deserves culture 

 indoors,, though in the open air it never presents a very 

 striking variegation — ^looks rather undecided, in fact. It 

 forms a very pretty plant for room decoration, requires none 

 but the most ordinary attention, and is easily obtained. In 

 France the plant is rather commonly used as an edging. 

 The Acanthuses too, and particularly A. lusitanicus used so 

 effectively out-of-doors, are also grown abundantly in rooms, 

 where they do very well. Everything proved to do well 

 indoors without the protection of a case is a gain to the 

 very large class who, from choice or necessity, like to grow 

 plants in rooms. 



Reform in the Conservatory. 



There are few things more worthy of the attention of 

 the numbers interested in indoor gardening in this country 

 than the superior mode of embellishing conservatories and 

 winter gardens which is the rule in France and on the 

 Continent generally. Conservatories and similar structures 

 are, it is true, scarcer abroad than at home, but whenever 

 they are erected they are gracefully verdant at all times, 

 being filled with handsome exotic evergreens, planted and 

 arranged so as to present the appearance of a mass of 

 luxuriant vegetation, and not that of a glass shed filled 

 with pots and prettiness with which we are all so familiar. 



We build more glass houses than any other nation, but 

 have as yet nearly everything to learn as to the arrange- 

 ment of the most important of them, or what is usually 

 called the conservatory. This in some form is an adjunct 

 to a large class of country and suburban houses ; sometimes 

 it is well placed and an ornament to the house, but more fre- 

 quently a thing which to a tasteful person would seem better 

 placed among the out-offices. When unsatisfactory, the cause 

 is in the structure of the building or in its contents — often 

 in both, generally in the latter. As regards the form and 



