( i 0 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
August 7, 1886, 
LONDON GARDENING.— IV. 
The Last Lions in the Path. 
I. Intractable Soil.—In the north and north-west 
of London the soil is clay, and of the uncompromising 
kind known as London Clay,—stiff and fathomless, 
with an ominous tinge of indigo in its complexion. 
The only thing to be done with this is to take it out to 
the depth of a couple of feet, and replace it with a 
judicious mixture of crumbly loam, rotten manure and 
leaf mould, kept open by a liberal handful here and 
there, of sharp) (not soft) sand. “But surely clay is 
good for Roses,” I hear someone object, “ and the stiffer 
the better ! ” In the abstract, yes ; but there is often 
danger in the application of abstract doctrines to par¬ 
ticular cases, and if you are a London gardener this is 
one of the forms of flattering unction which you must 
not lay to your individual soul. Roses do like clay, 
but clay alone cannot sustain them ; no flowers are 
more fastidious than they about the air they breathe. 
Outside the smoke of large towns indeed “London 
clay may, by a little judicious manipulation, be made 
to suit them well, but in alliance with our invincible 
enemy, Impure Air, its embrace is little short of deadly. 
Hoi are Roses impatient of bad air alone ; quantity as 
well as quality must be provided if the grower wishes 
to succeed, and few indeed are the London gardens airy 
enough to make this possible. Hot that I have not 
seen standards blooming in the clayey ground north of 
the Park, but they were regularly doctored by the 
gardener,—the vitiated soul about their roots often 
replaced by spadefuls of fresh manure, their stems 
washed and dressed, and every form of artificial culture, 
short of glass, lavished upon them Such Rose trees, 
however, are like patients kept alive on brandy, and 
even so their propped up lives were very short, it was 
admitted, as well as precarious while they lasted. 
In the south and south-west districts the London 
soil is largely gravelly, and I speak from experience 
when I say that this is less easy to deal with than the 
play : the top of that you remove, to make way for 
something better, but what remains below is service¬ 
able in this way, that it provides a cool bottom, and it 
preserves the goodness of the good soil above it. Of 
course all gardens, and especially clayey ones, must be 
drained, but if this is properly done the sides of the 
walks act as conduits for storm-water, and the borders 
are not seriously damaged by abnormally heavy rain j 
and the value of the “holding” properties of clay, 
especially in summer, when a hot sun and drought 
prevail, is often under-estimated. I know how cold 
and damp it is in winter, but where a proper depth of 
it has been removed, the chill below will not strike 
upwards so far as the roots of ordinary-sized plants. 
The gravelly London soil, on the other hand, I have 
found preternaturally dry, and exhausted in an in¬ 
credibly short time. Probably the cause is to be found 
in the network of drain-pipes of one kind and another 
which underlies the surface, and the gravel of the sub¬ 
soil is in many parts of a very loose and open sort ; 
still, only experience could have convinced me of the 
extraordinarily rapid effect of this subterranean suction. 
To meet the difficulty there must be recourse to en¬ 
richments on the surface ; one load of thoroughly- 
decayed manure suffices in my own case to cover the 
border 3 ins. deep, and this, laid on in late September, 
is gently washed in by the winter rains to the soil 
enwrapping the roots of the plants. The dose must be 
repeated yearly. 
Prom the disappointing dryness of the light division 
of London soil, we should pass naturally to the con¬ 
sideration of all that is thwarting in the London water 
supply, regarded, of course, strictly from the floricul- 
tural point of view ! But before I have quite done with 
the soil, I must warn all tyros in London gardening 
not to neglect an initial precaution rather like the 
solemn search, on the eve of the session, in the cellars 
under the Houses of Parliament for a Guy Fawkes and 
all his sinister paraphernalia. Like, and yet unlike, 
for in my gardening friend’s case the strong probability 
will be that Gunpowder Plots by the dozen will be 
revealed, so that her time will not have been wasted in 
a fruitless investigation. The place she must search, 
with fork and spade, will be the borders, and the 
object of her search, brickbats. It appears to be the 
practice of wall builders to bury all dibris on the scene 
of their labours, presumably to escape the trouble of 
carting them away. And verily it is a sowing of 
dragon’s teeth, only the armed warriors that result do 
not spring up and show themselves, or do anything half 
so manly ; children of darkness that they are, they 
prefer the Guy Fawkes stamp of warfare, and skulk 
and crawl out of sight, in seven cases out of ten, 
perhaps, never unearthed or even suspected at all. 
Excepting decayed wood, the gardener can scarcely have 
a more mischievous form of subterranean store than 
masses of porous and half-baked brick. Dislodge one 
of these fragments, after energetic digging, and you 
will find it a lodging-house of the least exclusive and 
most objectionable type ; it will instantly become a 
question whether you shall first address yourself to the 
dangerous characters embedded in the structure itself or 
to the colony of casual vagrants exposed by its up¬ 
heaval. Drab, brown, slate-coloured and white— 
curly, wrinkled, furry, clammy, or lad in a coat of 
mail—centipedes in all sizes, slugs, earwigs, beetles, 
and a host of nameless “organisms”—creatures with 
long bodies and no visible legs, creatures with long legs 
and next to no visible bodies, scuttling, crawling, 
wriggling, as their hereditament determines,—there 
they go, burrowing in the soil or sneaking into their 
legion cells in the brickwork,—or here they come, up 
your sleeve, into your pocket, down your neck if that 
road seems to them good,—ugh ! let the curtain drop ! 
But do not forget to search your cellars before you 
deposit your precious plants overhead ; otherwise their 
juicy roots may be delicate morsels for the murderous, 
devouring traitors below. And have a tub of scalding 
water at your elbow, in which every brickbat, with its 
assortment of malignant beings, can be bodily and 
promptly accommodated. In one border, 25 ft. long, 
I have brought to light three barrowloads of them ! 
Experto erode. 
And now for a few words about London Water. They 
need be but few, for this is one of the grievances that can 
only be recorded, with no counterpoise to the record in 
the shape of a way of escape found, tried and trusty. 
We London flower-growers note with a grim smile, 
the advice in many a floricultural treatise not to use 
any but rain-water. Excellent council, and easy to follow 
in the country, where water-butts of generous circumfer¬ 
ence, are posted wherever a pipe or a gutter-spout pours 
forth roof-collected rain, and where all but inexhaust¬ 
ible soft-water tanks express themselves in copious 
gushings, which a touch of a pump-handle will evoke. 
But to us Londoners, the injunction is the bough 
waving outside the grasp of Tantalus. All we can do 
to solace ourselves is to dwell on the not usually 
solacing fact that even the rain that falls straight from 
the clouds is black before it reaches London flowers— 
(let anyone who questions it put a clean handlight, at 
midsummer, over a plant just before a shower, and 
wipe the glass with a clean cloth just after it!)—how 
agreeable, then, to picture to ourselves the compound 
blackness that would gather in those water-butts that 
we have not ! as agreeable in fact as the fox of renown 
found it to reflect on the horrible tartness of the 
grapes he could not reach. 
Let us content ourselves, since we must, with the 
water that Water Companies supply, and be humbly 
thankful when there is plenty of it for our plants : 
let us moreover draw the water some hours before it 
will be wanted when pot-plants are to be watered, so 
that they may be spared the shock of a temperature 
much lower than their own. If the water is exposed 
to as much sun as is granted to the plants (supposing 
that there is any to grant to anything), the draught 
afterwards bestowed will refresh innocently and 
nutritiously, which many well meant waterings do not. 
To complete the case for the Cons before opening the 
case for the Pros, it remains to name a few plants 
which are better excluded, at first at all events, from 
the London garden of a beginner. Some there are 
which will grow in no London gardens,—some which 
will grow in this one but not in that,—and some which 
will consent to be grown (quite a different thing from 
growing !) only if their cultivator has qualified herself 
by a special study of their idiosyncrasies. Roses have 
already been mentioned, and to them we may add 
Primroses, Violets, Heartseases, Gentians,—but stay ! 
a more convenient method, it occurs to me, will be to 
state, as each plant is named, why it does not adapt 
itself kindly to the conditions of life in a London 
garden, and, where it is practicable, to point the 
explanation by reference to a plant of contrasting 
habit. To be sure, the Cons will mingle with the Pros 
a little, but what of that ? Is it not a relief to every¬ 
body when it is announced that such-and-such dis¬ 
putants have agreed to settle their little differences out 
of qourt ?— C. A. G. 
AN OLD-FASHIONED PLANT. 
Reinwaedtia tethagyne. — A popular plant in 
British Gardens, somewhere about a centurv ago, was 
the subject of this note, then known under the name 
of Linum tetragynum, but now as Reinwardtia tetra- 
gyne. It appears to have been in cultivation for some 
years, and then disappeared, with many other fine old 
plants, which we know from the figures in the earlier 
volumes of The Botanical Magazine. For its recent re- 
introduction into commerce we are indebted to Messrs. 
James Veitch & Sons, Chelsea, and Being a most useful 
winter-flowering subject, and withal one that is easily 
managed, there can be little doubt but that it will 
become popular again. It is a native of India ; a 
tove-flowering shrub, much resembling the well- 
nown Linum trigynum, but produces more flowers 
in a truss, and is of a deeper shade of yellow. Unlike 
Linum trigynum, it is not subject to red spider, and 
therefore gives little trouble as regards keeping clean. 
It grows very freely in a mixture of peat, loam and 
silver sand, and roots freely from cuttings. The accom¬ 
panying illustration, for the use of which we are in¬ 
debted to Messrs. Veitch, was prepared from a fine 
stock of plants which flowered last winter. 
-—>V<-- 
THE DEEPDENE, DORKING. 
Such a princely estate as is comprised in Deepdene, 
Chart Park, and Betchworth Park, the whole running 
hard on 5000 acres, we may readily suppose would have 
a fine garden, although from its situation within a mile of 
Dorking station on the Brighton line, those who know 
the country, know that it would be interesting and in¬ 
structive to the lovers of gardening even without one, 
for its whole area is a scene of sylvan beauty, with its 
alternation of hill and dale with verdure clad, or, as in 
the case of one side of Box Hill, relieved by the appear¬ 
ance of the chalky cliff between the Yews which cling 
to it; its aged Beeches and Oaks naturally arranged so 
picturesquely that no landscape gardener could con¬ 
ceive anything so magnificent. However, the Deepdene 
has a garden, and a very fine and well kept one, and 
all the more beautiful that the seventy acres occupied 
by it gave such a beautiful outline for the display of the 
gardener’s art, which has been beautifying and im¬ 
proving it for many years past. In it may be found 
by the dozen, many rare conifers, and other trees as 
large as forest trees, and yet as perfect in shape as it is 
possible for them to be, for in the sandy loam here, the 
root and top-growth seems to be proportionate, and 
once a tree gets a hold it is safe. 
The carriage-drive through the park studded with 
fine Oaks and Chestnuts brings us to the gardens, the 
first evidence of which are some fine conifers with (near 
the grand squarely-built mansion) a giant Abies Doug- 
lasii, some 70 ft. in height and 50 ft. across, well 
occupying a green nook devoted to it; and further on 
a stately Larch, with its trunk covered with Ivy, 
forming, as it were, a second pyramidal tree, which has 
the advantage of rendering the Larch ornamental after 
its foliage has been shed, and heightening its beauty 
whilst in leaf. From the front of the mansion a fine 
prospect opens on the left, disclosing beyond the high 
Copper Beech, the varied hues of the different conifers, 
and the neat surface of the Italian garden, the front 
ranging over the Rhododendron-crowned knoll in the 
foreground, away over the hill to the tall Beeches in 
the back, while on the other side an equally fine view 
is obtained, the aged Cedars being very conspicuous. 
At the north front stands a Tulip tree SO ft. in height, 
and equally large Copper Beech and evergreen Oaks, 
with, among other fine groups in the distance, one of 
great beauty composed of tall trees of Wellingtonia 
gigantea and Abies lasiocarpa. Hear by, too, is a 
lovely nook enclosed by trees and belted with Rho¬ 
dodendrons, in which a bed of Acer negundo, some 
clumps of yellow St. John’s Wort, and of the tall 
and graceful flowering Spiraea Lindleyana are very 
handsome. 
At the front of the mansion stand some fine Orange 
trees in full bloom, which are interesting on account of 
the treatment they receive, and which ensures such a 
fine display of bloom every year. In the first week in 
Hovember they are put into a cave where they get but 
little light, and, of course, no artificial heat, and there 
they remain until the first week in April when they are 
replaced on the terrace. In most gardens Orange trees 
are shy flowering, because they are always kept in the 
greenhouse, it would, therefore, be well for the possessors 
