GARDENING IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS. 



51 



100 men, and I have a Dicksonia antarctica, raised from spores ripened 

 in Arran, and my Cordyline australis are all from seed ripened at Scourie, 

 in the north of Sutherland. The Billardiera longifolia, from Tasmania, 

 with its wonderful blue berries, is a most striking climber. Acacia 

 dealbata, the Antarctic beech, Betula Maximoiviczii from Japan (with 

 leaves as big as those of the lime), the New Zealand Rata, and 

 Buddleia Colvillei from the Himalaya, are all flourishing, thanks to 

 the Gulf Stream and lots of peat and shelter. There are (as I 

 suppose must be the case everywhere) a very few things which are not 

 happy here, and they are plants which I dare say most people would 

 have thought would have revelled in this soil and climate, viz., the 

 Wistarias, Camellias, Kalmias, Euonymus, Tamarix, and Cyclamens, but 

 I hope to master even these in course of time. One thing I wonder at 

 is, how so many of my exotics seed themselves far more freely than 

 any natives, except perhaps birch, and gorse, and broom, though I 

 ought perhaps to mention that neither of the two latter is indigenous 

 to this particular district. The strangers which seed so freely are 

 Rhododendrons, Cotoneaster Simonsii, Berberis Daricinii, Veronica 

 salicifolia, Olearia macrodonta, Diplopappus chrysophylla, and Leyces- 

 teria formosa. 



And now I will venture to say something about the garden (the 

 kitchen garden, as my English friends always take care to call it). 



As is often the case with us poor Highlanders, I only possess the 

 one garden for fruit, flowers, and vegetables, and, as I have already 

 stated, it was mostly made out of an old sea beach, which most people 

 would say does not sound hopeful. Even now, in spite of a wall and a 

 gojd sea bank, the Atlantic threatens occasionally to walk in at its lower 

 doors, and the great northern divers, who float about lazily just outside, 

 appear quite fascinated by the brilliant colours inside when the lower 

 doors are left open for their benefit. 



The soil of this old sea beach was a four-foot mixture of about three 

 parts pebbles and one part of rather nice blackish earth, and the 

 millions of pebbles had to be got rid of. So in deep trenching it 

 digging forks were mostly used, every workman having a girl or boy 

 opposite him, and the process of hand-picking much resembled the gather- 

 ing of a very heavy crop of potatos in a field. The cost of the work 

 was great, as thousands upon thousands of barrow loads of small stones 

 had to be wheeled into the sea, and the place of the pebbles made up 

 with endless cartloads of peaty stuff from old turf dykes, red soil carted 

 from long distances, and a kind of blue clay marl from below the sea, 

 full of decayed oyster-shells and crabs and other good things, and hauled up 

 at very low tides ! There is also a terrace formed the whole length of 

 the garden, cut out of the face of a steep brae, which was just above the 

 old beach, and it had to be carved out of the solid gravel, and soil 

 brought from afar put on it. The cutting at the top was fully 12 feet 

 deep, and against it a retaining wall was built, which I covered with fan- 

 and cordon-trained fruit trees. 



When the cutting was first made we found a number of large holes 

 or burrows, going deep into the hillside. These, we were convinced (by 

 the various signs we found), must have been inhabited in prehistoric 



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