184 LONDON PARKS & GARDENS 
lawn, with a few large beds, touches the park-like 
meadows studded with trees. Sheep feeding with their 
tinkling bells gives a rural appearance. To the large, 
modern, very red brick house is attached a huge winter 
garden. This is on a very large scale, with lofty palms, 
date, dom, and cocoa-nut growing with tropical luxuri¬ 
ance in the central house, with a large camellia house on 
one side and a fernery with rock-work, pools, and gold¬ 
fish on the other. All this requires a good deal of 
keeping up—nearly £3000 a year—and although it has 
been open now some five years, it has been enjoyed by 
few. It is greatly to be hoped that it has a much- 
appreciated future before it. 
Such is a slight sketch of some of London’s Parks. 
No doubt there is much that could be changed for the 
better, both in design and planting : less sameness and 
meaningless formality without true lines of beauty in 
design would be an improvement. In planting, there 
might be more variety of British trees—alder, oak, ash, 
and hawthorn ; and a wider range of foreign ones—limes, 
American or Turkey oaks, and many others ; more 
climbing plants, such as Virginian creepers, more simple 
herbaceous borders and fewer clumps of unattractive 
bushes, and more lilacs, laburnums, thorns, almonds, 
cherries, and medlars in groups on the grass. If greater 
originality was displayed and a thorough knowledge of 
horticulture were shown, especially by the authorities 
that supervise the largest number of these parks, many 
improvements in existing ones could be easily achieved, 
and in forming new parks the same idea need not be so 
rigidly followed. But, in spite of small defects, the 
Parks as a whole are extremely beautiful, and Londoners 
may well be proud of them. 
