128 LONDON PARKS © GARDENS 
The effort to make use of the parks to supple¬ 
ment nature-teaching in the schools is also an advance 
in the right direction, and one that could be followed 
up with advantage. 
The trials of the climate of London, and the hurtful 
fogs, must not be forgotten when criticising. They 
are no new thing, and gardeners for two hundred 
years have had to contend with the smoke, and wage 
war against its effects. But the evil has, of course, 
become greatly intensified during the last fifty years. 
Fairchild, the author of the “City Gardener,” in 1722, 
regrets that plants will not prosper because of the 
“Sea Coal.” Mirabeau, writing from London in 1784, 
deplores the fogs in England, and especially “ those 
of London. The prodigious quantity of coal that is 
consumed, adds to their consistence, prolongs their 
duration, and eminently contributes to render these 
vapours more black, and more suffocating—you feel 
this when rising in the morning. To breathe the 
fresh morning air is a sort of happiness you cannot 
enjoy in this immense Capital.” Yet in spite of this 
gloomy picture there are trees now within the London 
area, which were getting black when Mirabeau wrote. 
Smuts are by no means solely responsible for trees 
dying. There are many other contributory causes. 
The drainage and want of water is often a serious 
danger, and bad pruning in the case of the younger 
trees is another. When branches begin to die, it is a 
very safe and salutary precaution to lop them off, as 
has lately been done to such a noticeable extent in 
Kensington Gardens. But the cutting and pruning of 
trees by those employed by various municipal bodies is 
often lamentably performed. The branches are not cut 
