INTRODUCTION. 



XXI 



deners to part with their hundreds of thousands of tender 

 flowers or to endure a check in their career of converting 

 our parks into sumptuous gardens ; but if they saw that this 

 reduction of expenditure would lead to a more wholesome 

 outlay elsewhere^, they would willingly help out its adoption. 



No objection could be urged against the costly system 

 alluded to were it not for its expense^ which; as anybody 

 may see,, is growing under our eyes every day. It is a 

 very good and worthy thing to display much of the beauty 

 of exotic vegetation in our parks and public gardens, pro- 

 vided we can afford it without doing injustice to those who 

 cannot snatch as much time from toil as suffices for an 

 airing in the parks. Span a piece of ornamental park water 

 with a crystal palace, if you will ; convert it into a home 

 for the Great Amazonian Water Lily, and fi'inge it with 

 Palms and the richest tropical vegetation ; but first be assured 

 that you are able to afford it, and ask yourself whether the 

 amount required would not do twenty times the good if 

 expended in green grass, and trees, and flowers that endure 

 the open air of Britain. Make, if you will, another ridi- 

 culous parterre of stone and water squirts like that at the 

 head of the Serpentine ; but first consider whether it would 

 not be wiser to estabhsh a little verdure and freshness in some 

 of the more tumid parts of what Cobbett used to call the 

 "great wen.^^ The new avenue gardens in the Eegent's 

 Park, with their griffins and artificial stonework, have cer- 

 tainly cost as much as would have created an oasis in some 

 pestilential part of the East-end. Even the annual expense 

 of keeping up one of these park gardens is equivalent to 

 what would suffice to form and plant a little square like 

 those so freely dotted about Paris during the past dozen 

 years ; while the mere conversion of a strip of breezy park 

 into an elaborate garden effects no good whatever from a 

 sanitary point of view. 



Let us illustrate the matter in a less general way. Last 

 year a number of Bay-trees in tubs were placed in Trafalgar 

 Square and it need hardly be added that these require fre- 

 quent attention both in summer and winter — a storehouse 

 during the latter season — while the wooden tubs in which 



