THE AMATEUR’S FLOWER GARDEN. 
223 
August. It follows of necessity that the more we trust to 
tropical or subtropical plants for the embellishment of the 
flower-garden, the greater is the risk we incur that, instead of 
embellishing, we shall disfigure it. What the season is to be, 
we never know in time to make minute and special prepa¬ 
ration for it, and a cold wet summer will damp our ardour, 
while it destroys the tender plants which in an hour of 
exceptional sunshine we may have drafted into the sub¬ 
tropical garden. The employment of tender plants for pur¬ 
poses of outdoor embellishment is a task that corresponds 
in degree of difficulty with the degree of tenderness of the 
plants employed. The nearer we go to the tropics for mate¬ 
rial, the nearer do we verge towards the impossible in the 
endeavour to adapt them to the average conditions of a 
British summer. In reference to some of the so-called sub¬ 
tropical plants, we may employ an Americanism to indicate 
the difficulty that attends their cultivation in the open air, by 
saying that it takes two men and a boy to hold one up ; for, 
to speak the plain truth, many of the plants that we find in 
full fig in subtropical gardens are not worth, as they stand, a 
tenth part of the labour it has cost to place them there. A 
great musa torn to ribbons by angry winds, for example, may 
be likened in its sad fate to a magnificent passage of Shakes¬ 
peare, which some noisy novice has just mouthed in coster¬ 
monger tone to a “ discerning public.” But we are not to 
condemn subtropical gardening on account of the many men 
and boys required to hold it up, because it is a new thing, 
and we must always expect mistakes in the region of expe¬ 
riment, and in this case mistakes are scarcely less instructive 
than successes; for if the last teach us what to eat and drink 
in the way of vegetable beauty, the first w T ill teach us v/hat to 
avoid. 
Gardening is always more or less a warfare against nature. 
It is true we go over to the “ other side ” for a few hints, 
but we might as well abandon our spades and pitchforks as 
pretend that nature is everything and art nothing. Our gar¬ 
dens are crowded with the plants of other climes, and these 
for the most part can only live so long as art supports them, 
for nature would soon kill them out, and plant their graves 
with chickweed, if left to her own sweet will. Therefore in 
subtropical gardening art is everything, and the artist must 
begin by preparing for his purposes an artificial soil and an 
