like dark-coloured wood, whose external hue
alone harmonises properly with trees and
flowers.

A garden where everything is in its place,
apart even from the most beautiful and luxuriant
vegetation, creates a sensation of perfect
harmony, and formed on this principle does not
produce the painful impression often felt on entering
a garden after a walk in the country, where
Nature alone has been at work. There are
harmonies of plants, of forms, of colours, and like
a painter constructing his picture, a red or yellow
tone tells best in this or that particular spot.
Space, for instance, may apparently be created
in a garden by planting bluish-tinted willows,
Bohemian olives, and Flemish poplars, the under
part of the leaves of which are white; while
colours are heightened by placing certain flowers
in juxtaposition, the violet beside the yellow,
and so forth. On the other hand, nothing offends
the eye more than the attempted adaptation of
mineral hues to those of Nature. There is an
unhappy tradition, religiously preserved by cockney
gardeners, which consists in painting seats,
trellises, summer-houses, everything of that
sort, green—the result of which is utter
dissonance with the tints of vegetation, which
invariably suffer by contrast with the hard, glaring,
metallic colour.

Having walled himself in to his heart's
content, M. Alphonse Karr describes the contents
of his garden. "In the first place it is not
large. Secondly, it is cultivated in a particular
manner. This cultivation is not apparent.
The turf, sprinkled with crocuses and violets
in spring, and meadow saffron in autumn,
seems in its natural state, and the briars and
roses grow like the wild sorts in the hedges.
The lily of the valley, the primrose, and the
cyclamen flower beneath the trees without asking
for the slightest care; so much so that they
are forgotten and found again, every year. It is
either the fault of the garden or of the dahlias,
that these flowers produce a bad effect in it.
Dahlias will not look as if they had been dropped
there by a bird or cast by the wind. As they
open out their rich corollas, they tell of the
gardener; they show who are their tutors;
they betray their connexions; they are formal,
starched, high-cravated; we quarrel with each
other, in fact, and they are gone. There was,
perhaps, another reason for their banishment.
The roses, violets, whitethorn, periwinkles,
primroses, mingle in youth with our first
sensations; we see in their yearly renewal all our
early expectations, all our faded illusions; they
tell us of the days which were past, and the
dreams that are gone. The dahlia has nothing
to relate to people of my age. I am forty-two
years old, and there were no dahlias when I was
a child,—in that garden where my soul
expanded to the sun when I thought and loved.
However this may be, I have proscribed the
dahlias, yet without hating them. In my garden
filled with friends, dahlias were intruders
who bored me. But I do not object to see
them now and then. A neighbour of mine
has a fine collection, which he keeps in perfect
order, and I sometimes pay him a visit for the
purpose of pleasing my eye with magnificent
colours. When the first frosts come next season
I am going to make an experiment
recommended by several gardeners. We know that
heliotropes stand the winter badly, even in an
orangery; we know, also, how they spread when
planted out; the thing is, to make them pass
the winter out of doors, and this is the way
to set about it: The first frost blackens the
branches of the heliotrope, and they must then
be cut off level with the ground; then, with
the débris of these branches, with sand and
chaff, you make above the tuft a mound somewhat
larger than a molehill, which keeps all
humidity from the root of the plant. It is
only in the middle of April" (we, in England,
should say May) "that all fear of frost
is over, and then the mound may be
destroyed."

M. Alphonse Karr has a great dislike to the
pedantic employment of botanic names in pretty
little gardens filled with familiar flowers. There
is a well-known book in France called the Bon
Jardinier, intended for the use of great and small,
and particularly of the latter; for it is the most
elementary, the most complete, the cheapest, and
the least voluminous of its kind. But, for some
time past, the Bon Jardinier has been departing
from the original simplicity of its style, and, instead
of being merely a good, honest, plain-speaking
little book, has set up for something scientific.
As M. Alphonse Karr says, instead of resigning
itself to the simple sabots of the gardener, it
wants to wear the creaking, polished boots of
the professor. The most convenient form for
those who are not learned botanists would be
to renounce the division of plants into botanical
families, enter them alphabetically by their
common names, and place the scientific ones
after them in brackets, with any additional
indication that may be thought desirable. But
the Bon Jardinier declines to do this; it
proceeds by double entry, referring the reader from
the common name to the scientific. For
example: "Oak" is wanted; see Quercus.--
"Holly;" see Ilex.-- "Beech;" see Fagus.--
"Chesnut;" see Castanea.—"Lilac; " see
Syringa, and so on. But this is not all. The
Bon Jardinier has also adopted new scientific
names, displacing the old ones, so that those
who thought themselves botanically gifted are
now all abroad again. The savants thought
proper to call the sea-side wallflower Cheiranthus
maritima. Very good; but stick to that
designation! On the contrary, they have
changed it to Malcomia. Then, again, the
Bindweed, with its beautiful white, violet, and
rose-coloured bells, received the name of Ipomea,
but, for some arbitrary reason, it has been
altered to Pharbites. "No!" exclaims M.
Alphonse Karr, "never will I sow that in my
garden! When I was twenty years of age I made
some verses on the bindweeds that climbed over
a hedge; who could be poetical on Pharbites?"
That rich autumnal flower, the China-Aster,