178 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, June 13, 1860. 
I shall relate, as simply as if it were addressed to 
school children, the very way I mean to go to work on 
that acre, provided the money is first in one hand, and the 
assent of the Council in the other. My time is of far 
more value to me than money is to some people, and I 
shall ^ire full two years’ superintendence to that acre, so 
that I shall have a deeper stake in it that way than the 
£5 bouncers, and then if it should fail all the cost will 
fall upon me, which I shall not shrink from; and that 
part in prospective is really a serious question to a man 
who is not much encumbered with money. 
There is one advantage in my favour over young 
volunteers. In my younger days it was a very difficult 
thing to get a respectable lawn, and I had seen such con¬ 
trivances resorted to in order to keep up respectable 
appearances, as no one of the volunteers could even think 
of in these days of fast things. It was a general practice 
before selected grass seeds could be had to sow lawns with, 
to inoculate the ground with small pieces of turf, as it 
was called. By that method the quantity of turf that 
would cover only one-quarter of an acre, was sufficient 
to inoculate four acres of lawn, the turf being divided 
into small squares of from four to six inches on the side. 
The ground had to be kept clean from weeds the first two 
seasons, and by the end of the third year, after inocu¬ 
lation, the lawn was thickly covered from the spreading 
growth of the inoculating pieces of turf. The last 
piece of ground which I have seen thus lawned was 
at Ledbury, in Herefordshire, in 1833—a new piece of 
ground taken to the lawn from the deer park belonging 
to the late and present Messrs. Biddulph, of the banking 
firm of Biddulph, Cocks, and Biddulph, Charing Cross. 
The gardener who did that inoculation w'as sent there 
by Hr. Bindley, from the garden at Chiswick. The 
proper seeds for a lawn, at that time, if they could be 
had, would cost about six or seven times as much as the 
inoculation, for I recollect very avcII being consulted on 
the two ways; but as far as I can recollect, the seeds 
were then just as high in price as that of Sperqula 
pilfer a is at the present moment. There was a funde- 
mental error, however, in all the inoculation that I have 
seen performed ; but before an improved form of inocu¬ 
lation was decided on, the Messrs. Lawson, of Edinburgh, 
had rendered inoculation useless, or very expensive, as 
compared with their selections of grass seeds for a quicker 
and a much cheaper covering. 
After going round the circle ever so many times, and 
after extending our lawns many times more since that 
day, here we are again just at the point we first started 
from. The whole of the garden at Forest Hill has been 
nearly inoculated ; the next-door neighbour has his part 
of the “ coach-ring ” inoculated; a lady in the neigh- j 
bourhood has had a steep bank inoculated this season ; 1 
and Mr. Summers has inoculated ever so much of his 
Crystal Palace Nursery, and a corner in the Crystal 
Palace grounds, all of which I have seen with my own 
eyes this last month of May ; and I was very much 
amused to find that all that inoculation was performed 
with the identical error of the elder school of turf-cut¬ 
tings. But the error is most serious now at the price of 
Spergula, as you must go to just double the expense for 
plants, or else keep making a lawn of it one more season 
in hand. 
In that year of 1833 the Hoctor’s man and his foreman, 
also from Chiswick Garden, with your humble servant, 
discovered the error of the inoculation before the end of 
June ; the pieces were as near six inches square as they 
could be cut, and the distances were nine inches apart 
every way. The Spergula is now done on the same 
principle; good tufts of it being set, or planted, six 
inches apart. Both systems are fundamentally wrong. 
The increase, or growth, for extension to cover the spaces 
is only from the outside of the piecea of turf, and from 
the outer edges of the tufts of Spergula; the centre of 
the pieces and of the tufts is at a dead standstill the 
whole time your work is in progress. You get no in¬ 
crease from the increased sizes of your pieces ; you only 
cover so much surface at first. It is self-evident, there¬ 
fore, that if the pieces of turf were cut three inches 
square, instead of six inches, the area of increase would 
be nearly doubled ; and the same rule applies with more 
force to all inoculations with Spergula—the larger the 
pieces you plant, the less growth or increase you obtain, 
as compared with much closer planting with the smallest 
pieces that can well be handled for transplanting. Now, 
if you can thus perceive the drift of my meaning, you 
will hold with me in my way of planting the acre for the 
Horticultural Society as a fair specimen for the three 
kingdoms, and for all foreigners from all parts of the 
temperate regions of the earth to judge by. If I fail 
with it, little harm is done, I shall be just as well as I 
was before the trial; but if I succeed, the thing will be 
| the greatest boon to gardening which any one age since 
! the flood has supplied—-that I am quite certain about. 
The next in degree to it was the discovery of the sexual 
system in plants. 
Keeping the lawns is now, and always has been, the 
greatest expense in gardening. When the whole of what 
is under the mowing machines is covered with Spergula, 
one man will do, at his ease, the work of forty or fifty 
hard-worked men. Add that power, or the one-quarter 
of it, to the other departments of the garden, and the 
effect will be more than we can calculate. But say that 
you are to give ninety-nine gardeners out of every 
hundred, ten men to w'ork under them, for every man 
they now employ, and that would not be more than one- 
half of the power which would be given to them by 
covering all their grass with Spergula. There is not a 
good gardener anywhere who could not tell you, and 
prove it, that gardening could be improved to double 
what it is now by adding one-third more to the labour of 
the garden. Men of reflection see that clear enough ; 
but this monstrous expense of mowing and sweeping, and 
the wear and tear of mens’ bodies, sweating away their 
prime animal spirits in work which has no other or 
higher results than the daily rounds of the housemaid; 
and as it is the very opposite of a blessing to the men, so 
I it is the bottomless pit of garden expenses. The easiest 
way in the world to get up out of this is to sanction and 
practise the use of a very superior substitute for grass 
which will never require mowing. 
The way that I would go to work on the acre at Ken¬ 
sington Gore would be this : Have as many plants in 
60-pots, the same size as you can buy at present, as would 
engage the planters a day or two, turn them out of the 
pots, and divide the balls into twelve pieces, or more if I 
could. The present method is to divide such plants into 
four or six parts, but that is too extravagant on the Bob 
Boy scale, as the centres of such large pieces must neces¬ 
sarily lie idle, the growth being only from the outsides of 
the pieces, as in inoculating with pieces of turf. Six inches 
apart are the present distance at which the pieces are 
planted ; but my distances will only be three inches every 
way, and yet the same number of pots will cover the same 
quantity of ground as at present, and I shall have more 
than one-third extra growing surface. The plants will 
be watered as the planting proceeds ; and when the sur¬ 
face is dry, a man will walk over each row “ heel and 
toe ” fashion, to press the plants firmly to the soil. If 
the weather is dry after the planting is finished, the whole 
acre will be watered from a garden-engine three times 
a-week for the first month. The whole will be rolled 
once a-week during that month when the surface is dry 
enough to bear the roller, and twice a-month for the rest 
of that summer. The ground will be made as a flower¬ 
bed the first and second season; and after that it will 
want nothing more done to it until the youngest of the 
life members of the Horticultural Society has grandchild¬ 
ren to play about on the velvety surface. I mean nothing 
more than sweeping and rolling, or pulling up a weed 
