A YEAR IN A GARDEN ON N.-W. COAST OP ROSS-SHIRE. 79 
A YEAR IN A GARDEN ON THE NORTH-WEST 
COAST OF ROSS-SHIRE.* 
By Osgood Mackenzie, F.R.H.S. 
March. 
I returned from the South on March 3, to find all my treasures 
wonderfully well , preserved from the effects of winter. January, 
I was told, was something awful up here in the way of hurricanes 
and floods, but there was next to no frost, so my tenderest exotics 
did not mind the weather in their snug corners. The only things 
I found dead were a small, and to me unknown, Eucalyptus of doubtful 
hardiness, which someone had sent me on trial, and a Sutherlandia 
from South Africa, which bloomed well in the autumn (something in 
the way of a Clianthus), but gave up before the whiter really started. 
I also lost, towards the spring, two of those new bright-coloured 
Leptospermums (Nicholli and Chapmanii), which, I believe, I killed by 
over-care and coddling, having covered them (as it was their first 
winter) with night-caps of thin scrim ; but my experience is that 
covering does not always answer ; in fact, more often than not, it 
does harm, as I found when I first started growing Eucalypti. Thus 
I have got off, so far, uncommonly well, unless April punishes me), 
or perhaps even May, by a sharp frost, which is particularly hurtful, 
especially to the soft young shoots of the earlier-starting Rhododen- 
drons. 
My winter-flowering Rhododendrons did great things as usual 
with us, and their beauty was such that people in London would hardly 
credit they could possibly have been grown out of doors in the Nurth, 
and the masses of R. Nobleanum and R. praecox, and the branches of 
Andromedas and Hamamelis posted to us, made us all but forget 
it was winter ! On March 3 I found the dear old Narcissus scoticus 
and N. pallidus praecox. and also N. minimus, expanded in consider- 
able quantity ; in fact, we always reckon on having them out here 
in February ; and N. cyclamineus is never far behind them. The last 
is so dainty, and does so well, and spreads by seeding itself freely, 
as many of the Narcissi do here. I also found Rhododendron Shiltoni 
out on my arrival, and it is really almost exactly like one of its parents, 
the beautiful R. Thomsoni, only five to six weeks earlier, which 
I am told is due to its other parent being R. barbatum. Curiously, 
I have had no luck with the latter so far. It is one of the very few 
Rhododendrons which have rather gone against me. 
R. ciliatum also started expanding in the end of February, and 
* For a description of the garden and its situation see " Gardening in the 
Western Highlands," Journal R.H.S. (1908), xxxiv. p. 47. 
