236 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and the deciduous shrubs — oh ! autumn is very lovely. But how 

 about the winter? Well, some devotees of hardy gardening tell 

 us to leave all the old stalks and decaying foliage, and to rejoice 

 therein. Now I yield to none in my admiration of the colours 

 and forms of leafless but living twigs and branches in the winter : 

 the yellow and almost crimson of some of the Willows ; the 

 claret-plum colour some of the Plum bark gathers ; the silver 

 snow of the Birch, surmounted by the falling spray of its delicate 

 claret-coloured twigs ; the bright yellowy-red russet of the 

 Scotch Firs and Larches ; the grey- dove colour of the Oak trunks, 

 the twigs all covered with glaucous haze, through which the rosy 

 nut-brown of the bark or skin gleams out ; the exquisite harmony 

 of colour in the lichen-and-moss-bearing gnarled branches and 

 gouty-looking branchlets of old Apple-trees, and so on ; but I can 

 see no beauty in the absolutely dead stalks of Lilies, Phloxes, 

 Peonies, Sunflowers, Michaelmas Daisies, Chrysanthemums, and 

 such things. I seem to see in the one class of colour the evidence 

 of suspended but existing life, and in the other the presence of 

 death and decay and gloom. True, one knows the rootstocks 

 are all living (at least if the slugs are sleeping), but these dead 

 memorials of a past summer's glory can never to my mind be 

 things of beauty, and are better removed to the rubbish heap 

 and the whole garden tidied, as soon as the leaves have fallen. 

 Indeed, I believe it better for the plants to do this. The 

 decaying stalks of Lilies, e.g., form the most convenient and tooth- 

 some highways for slugs, caseworms, the larvas of cockchafers, 

 and such like, to the dormant bulbs beneath ; and in other cases 

 the old stems accumulate leaves over and round the rootstocks, 

 and by thus harbouring and attracting slugs and damp do, in 

 my opinion, far more harm than the slight protection they afford 

 from frost does good. So I always have a clean sweep made as 

 soon as ever the sap has thoroughly gone down and the stalks are 

 dead and the leaves fallen. But this leaves the borders absolutely, 

 or almost absolutely, bare from the box or turf edgings to the back- 

 ground of shrubs or trees. The problem is how, at a small outlay 

 of money, time, and labour — and this is a most important item — 

 to make these borders as pretty and interesting in winter as 

 they have been in summer. The answer to the problem can be 

 stated in four words. Evergreen plants in pots. It is easily 

 spoken, but it takes a longish time to work out satisfactorily. Of 



