CURRENT LITERATURE.
An Island Garden. By Celia Theater. (Osgood, McIlvaine, and Co.)—We are getting a little overdone with garden literature. The authoress of "An Island Garden" is even more enthusiastic over her subject than most of her fellows, she starts on a high note, lavishes superlatives on the seeds, exhausts her vocabulary over the plants, and becomes quite awe-stricken over the blossoms with which she decorates her " shrine," and the thirty-two peer- less glasses on the " altar ; " indeed, she acknowledges that she could almost have kissed the "imported" toads that fed on the enemies of her precious garden. A hundred and twenty-six pages of gush are devoted to the description of a plot of ground fifty feet long by fifteen wide, on Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, U.S.A. We acknowledge the perseverance needed in stocking even such a small space with flowers when we read that every seedling has to be transplanted in the spring from the mainland, and that few perennials survive the long winter of frost and snow. There are some pretty descriptions of the garden, notably of a tame humming-bird flitting among the Larkspurs (every flower is dignified with a capital letter), but the coloured illustrations are gaudy, and have the effect of badly done water-colours. Mrs. (or Miss ?) Thaxter's method of raising some of her seedlings during the early months of the year sounds practical, " For those that do not bear trans- planting I prepare other quarters, half filling shallow boxes with sand, into which I set rows of egg-shells close together, each shell cut off at one end, with a hole for drainage at the bottom. These are filled with earth and in them the seeds of the lovely yellow, white, and orange Iceland Poppies are sowed. By and by, when comes the happy time for setting them out in the garden beds, the shell can be broken away from the oval ball of earth that holds the roots without disturbing them, and they are transplanted almost without knowing it."
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