October 17. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
39 
you ask a builder the meaning of the panel, he will 
tell you it is a square of wainscoting, and of other 
things, down to the front-door which he has just 
panelled, the panels being the sunk parts. In the lan¬ 
guage of landscape-gardening, we follow the builder 
rather than the lawyers, and we say of a piece of 
ground which is below the general level, that it is a 
panel, or sunk panel, whatever the shape of it may be; 
but if the Lord Advocate had to explain the formation 
of the Italian garden at the Crystal Palace to Lord 
Brougham, very likely the ex-Chancellor would under¬ 
stand him if he wrote that the grounds were laid out in 
arrays of panels from north to south, or nearly so. 
Therefore, if some people can hardly comprehend my 
panels, from not having seen a space of ground sunk on 
purpose, or the surrounding tracts risen, which comes to 
the same thing, others will understand me at once, from 
their own knowledge of how panels were made. 
Now, if an upholsterer had orders to furnish a room, 
or a cabinet-maker and joiner had orders to make the 
furniture to suit, and the master found, when all were 
done, that his tables and stands, great and small, 
were all made circular, would it not be excusable if lie 
said so-and-so about his tradesmen, when he found 
that none of his tables, or stands for ornaments, would 
suit the corners of his drawing-room, or any room in 
the house? all the rooms having square corners, and all 
this profusion of furniture being of circular outline. 
When you place the common-shaped oblong table up 
in the corner of a room it fits exactly, and no space is 
left as when a round table is put in, a fact which every 
housemaid in the country knows as well as any of us; 
and no housemaid, who is worthy of the name, has ever 
been known to place a round table exactly in the corner 
of a room, “ case it won’t suit.” I have assisted house¬ 
maids to “ shift” tables and stands, I know not how 
many hundred times, and I know the philosophy of their 
whole secrets from the drawing to the lumber-room and 
linen-closet, so that I have actual proofs of what I 
assert about putting round furniture into square corners; 
and if you take Euclid on the point, he takes the side of 
the housemaid : then, if you take Euclid, or the house¬ 
maid, or your humble servant, or all three of us, you 
will find we arc all opposed to putting or making round 
beds in a square corner; but you may do just as you 
like, and if you do not square with us, you will find a 
precedent, in your favour in one of the grandest gardens 
in Europe. 
But there is another side to the question, and that 
side of it was brought before me but the other day. I 
met a gentleman from London, in the neighbourhood of 
Kingston; he said he expected to see me, and had 
two plans of a new flower-garden he is making, which 
he brought on purpose to show me. It is an oblong 
shape, with a walk all round, and in each of the four 
corners there is a circular flower-bed; they were pro¬ 
posed and fitted for the corners by the “ Lady of the 
hoose,” as they would say in Scotland: most ladies like 
a “ good fit,” and know how to arrange for it. The 
corners of grass were rounded off, and the circular beds 
had two feet of grass verge between them and the walks; 
there could not be a better fit, and it is easier and more 
genteel-like to walk round these corners and beds than 
to turn sharp at an angle. The whole flower-garden is 
laid out on the promenade system, that is, with all the 
flower-beds alongside of the walks, as they are in the 
Crystal Palace-garden, and most other public gardens; 
therefore, circular beds at the corners, and the corners 
cut off to fit, arc by far the best: then with groups of 
shrubs, or single trees, or shrubs, here and there, a little 
farther from the walks, and a free open space all along 
the centre, a garden of this kind is perfect in itself, and 
looks larger to a stranger than it really is, on account of 
the centre being free from end to end. 
All the planting of flowers, trees, and shrubs that you 
see at the Crystal Palace is done on this principle—pro¬ 
menade fashion; and vast as the whole is in reality, 
when you walk along, every part and place looks larger 
than it is, in fact, owing to this judicious way of plant¬ 
ing. It is a mistaken notion altogether to suppose, for 
one moment, that this garden is too large for any one to 
try to imitate it, or anything in it,—because the prin¬ 
ciple can be applied, and the very shape of the beds too, 
in any space whatever-, yet one gentleman out of twenty 
cannot see that; but others do. This very gentleman 
from London wished to have a group of Rhododendron- 
beds in the very centre of his garden, and it was for that 
group he had the second plan with him, but the “ guid 
wife” would not hear of it, and I was appealed to; but { 
now l shall be spared, as I shall point in future to what j 
is done in the people’s own garden at Sydenham. 
As to the flower-garden plants, and the number of 
kinds of each family, we must not be guided by what 
was done there this season, confessedly, in a very great 
hurry; but nothing is more instructive, or better to 
learn from, than keeping memorandums of the plans of 
planting for each year separate. I have every bed and 
border in the garden booked for myself, as they were 
planted this season, with private remarks, which I shall 
not let out of my hands for the first three years after 
the whole is completed. Of Scarlet Geraniums, the 
greatest number are of Tom Thumb, then Oompactum, 
after thorn, a Horse-shoe kind I did not kuow ; but this 
kind did not seem to be suited for the soil; it did not 
look happy; the caterpillars took to it, and it was beaks 
all over, going to seed; I would discard it from the 
collection at once; beds of it were in the north-east 
of the terrace-garden, edged with light purple Verbenas. 
In some rows of mixed Scarlets were a few plants of 
Punch, the Froymore Scarlet, and a few other mixtures. 
All the vases, of which there are hundreds, were planted 
with mixtures, Scarlet Geraniums being the ground 
colour of all of them; and throughout the whole of them 
not the least deviation appears in the planting. A few 
Calcolarias, some white patches of different flowers, 
and also a few blues, were interspersed with the Scarlet 
Geraniums. Two of the fountain-basins, one in the 
middle division of each half of the garden, were each 
surrounded by sixteen marble vases entirely of Tom 
Thumb. All the vases here, and along the balustrade 
walls, being about, or a little over, three feet in diameter, 
and all the plants in all the vases were in the utmost 
health. Thus it will be seen, that the common prac¬ 
tice of using such plants as trail over the sides of 
vases and baskets is not countenanced by Sir Joseph 
Paxton, for nothing of the sort is attempted in all the 
garden, except in two or four vases, I forget which, that 
stand round the fountains inside the Palace, and the 
blue Lobelia gracilis is there as edging to Tom Thumb 
Geraniums, and I never saw a Lobelia edging so perfect 
out-of-doors. At Shrubland Park, during my reign, no 
edging was ever used to any of the vases along the ter- i 
races, they were nearly on the same plan as at the 
Crystal Palace; the only difference was in favour of j 
Shrubland, common mixtures being entirely repudiated ; 
there ; but there were as many kinds of plants for vases | 
as are seen in the whole of the Italian Garden at Syden¬ 
ham ; but every vase had a distinct kind to itself, dupli¬ 
cate vases, or duplicate set of vases, being always 
planted with the same kind of plant. The vases on the 
terrace at Newnham Courtney, near Oxford, were filled 
as at Shrubland Park, when I was there in 1852. How¬ 
ever, I never saw mixed planting in vases so well 
managed as at the Crystal Palace, the secret being in 
giving the same tint, or rather tone, to the whole lot of 
them all the way round, and that tone is from a small 
proportion of yellow and white to one whole ground¬ 
colour of iutense scarlet. No one who does not thoroughly 
