THE LADIES MAGAZINE OF GARDENING. 
259 
plants in London, Mrs. Wilkie having taken the precaution of sowing her 
seed in a moist and sheltered situation. I was very much struck with this; 
as, reasoning from analogy, the Malope, which is a native of the arid sands of 
Barbary, ought to have succeeded best in a light dry soil. However, no 
reasoning can be put into competition with experience; and I can only 
tell my readers what I saw, leaving them to draw their own conclusions 
from it. The ClarJcia pulchella , and all the kinds of Candy-tuft, were 
splendid in Mrs. Wilkie's garden; and Sambucus racemosa , the red- 
berried elder, was growing' with the greatest luxuriance in her shrub¬ 
bery. 
Bothwell Castle is one of those places which are visited for the histo¬ 
rical recollections they excite, independently of any intrinsic merit they 
may possess. Bothwell Castle is, however, highly interesting to the 
gardener as well as to the antiquary. The keeping of the garden is 
perfect; nothing can be more neat and clean than the flower-beds, &c. ; 
and this is a rare merit in Scotland, where the extent of the pleasure- 
ground is, in general, much too great for the number of men employed to 
keep it in order. Mr. Turnbull, the gardener, is celebrated for his 
heaths and his calceolarias, the former being particularly splendid ; some 
of his seedlings surpassed, indeed, anything I have yet seen, in the beauty 
of tlieir flowers, though I did not think the appearance of the individual 
plants equal to that of the plants at Mrs. Lawrence’s, with which I was 
so much delighted previously to my leaving London (see p. 222). After 
walking through the gardens, and observing that the fruit was not so 
abundant as in some places in England, from the bad habit of cropping 
the borders, we entered the pleasure-grounds, and proceeded to the ruins 
of the ancient castle. Nothing can be finer than these ruins and the 
situation in which they are placed, commanding the river, on the opposite 
shore of which stand the remains of the ancient priory of Blantyre. 
Placed on two steep banks, based on the solid rock, and half hidden by 
noble trees, these two monuments of the pride and power of the priests 
and nobles of other days stand facing each other, with the lovely and 
tranquil Clyde flowing between,—the river and the rocks, in all their 
native beauty, perfect and unchanged, but the works of man, notwith¬ 
standing all the cost and labour bestowed on their construction, fast 
crumbling into dust. The ivy, the aristolochia, and many other climb¬ 
ing plants, twined gracefully round the ruined towers ; and the whole 
formed a scene of great beauty, independently of the interest attached to 
it from its historical associations. The modern house called Bothwell 
Castle is merely a modern house, looking like a piece taken out of a street 
and dropped accidentally and quite inappropriately in the midst of a fine 
