AUGUST. | 231 
men afterwards engaged in the operation at the Champs Elysees ; the 
seeds were being sown very thickly, and leaf-mould finely sifted over 
them. Of course this is all to be at an end, if we are to believe 
one-thousandth part of what is said of Spergula pilifera, but more of 
this by-and-by. Plants are used for the purposes of decoration which 
it would be vain for us to attempt. There was in one place a bed of 
India-rubber Plant (Ficus elastica) ; in another, one of Caladiums; in 
another, Begonias of various sorts. In their bedding out they have 
sometimes to learn of us. I saw no attempts at ribboning, or any 
such kaleidescope system as we have at the Crystal Palace—Geraniums, 
Calceolarias, Heliotropes, &c., all being mixed together, and their 
beauty somewhat marred, I thought, by this. But if they might thus 
learn from us, we might surely learn from them in our sale of flowering 
plants. Nothing can be more enticing than their “Marché aux 
Fleurs,” in the Place de la Madeleine, one blushed to think of our 
Covent Garden, about which we talk so much, but which I hold to be 
a dirty, dingy place, utterly unworthy of the great name we have 
justly obtained. The plants themselves were nothing very wonderful ; 
small well-bloomed Heliotropes, fancy and other Pelargoniums, Roses 
in pots, Mignonette, &c., but each enveloped in a nice sheet of 
white paper, ready to carry home.* One does not know what the Floral 
Hall is intended to be, but surely something more worthy of the well- 
deserved pre-eminence of English gardening might be erected for the 
sale of plants, than the dreary arcade of Covent-garden. Horse- 
Chesnuts and Plantains seemed the favourite trees for decorative 
purposes, and immense pains are taken with them to make them grow. 
In winter, they are regularly swathed, and in summer most diligently 
watered, but it will be long ere the Boulevards acquire that beauty of 
which successive revolutions have deprived them. 
And now a word as to the nursery gardens. I knew very well that 
in all that pertains to cultivation we are immensely beyond our 
neighbours, but I was not quite prepared to see such miserable 
apologies for nurseries as |. saw—untidy, mean, small, they were such 
as you might see in a third or fourth-rate provincial town in England. 
I visited one, that of Mons. R. C., close to Pere la Chaise. The garden 
was not half an acre in extent, the greenhouses were rather pits than 
houses—old, dusty, and dark—the plants crowded together, full of fly, 
lanky and drawn, but full of bloom. The greater portion of the Pelar- 
goniums (for of them I speak) were of the kinds we call French kinds ; 
and I saw one or two curious novelties that will, I doubt not, make 
their way over here. Verbenas were not planted out (June 12), so I 
could say nothing about them. There were some pretty-looking Del- 
phiniums, but nothing new. Mons. R. had just purchased the Orchids of 
Madame Pescatore, said to be the finest collection in France ; if so, they 
do not do these things half as well as we do in England, for 1 question 

* As an instance of the manner in which they adapt everything for orna- 
mentation, there was a large number of pots containing the common Oxeye 
Daisy, and pretty enough it looked. a ; ' 
+ I only mean in this to refer to the Parisian nurseries; I believe many in 
the provinces are very different. 
