WALL AND WATER GARDENS.*

THE great development of gardening which has taken place

in England during the last few years has encouraged the pro- duction of books on the subject till they threaten to become as numerous as those on cookery. But it is not the books written by Miss Jekyll which can be spared. Combining as she does scientific knowledge with artistic and literary gifts, no one is better qualified to educate and instruct without being pedantic or tiresome.

Miss Jekyll's earlier works took a wider range than the present one. In Wood and Garden, and still more in Home and Garden, she dealt in a personal way with the pursuits of various kinds which have made her own experience so encouraging as well as interesting to others. The present

book is more distinctly instructive, and therefore necessarily

deals with more technical details, which in less artistic and sympathetic hands might have been dull reading except for experts or very enthusiastic amateurs. But Miss Jekyll is never dull. Learned she often is,—indeed, throughout the book she shows intimate knowledge not only of the names of vastnumbers of plants, but of their special habits and tastes. Looked at apart from the charm of Miss Jekyll's handling, what could

be drier reading than chapters on dry walls and stone steps ? —and yet as each plant is mentioned with all its personal qualities and needs we feel that the flowers have indeed become real friends, and taken their places as such to be recognised and welcomed whenever we meet them.

The gardens specially written about here are gardens made on hillsides more or less steep, and fortunate enough to include some stream or boggy ground in their area. Terraced gardens are more associated with Italy than with England. They do not appeal to the ordinary possessor

of a garden, who looks for lawns and level paths, and has only lately learnt to expand his ideal of a garden so as to take in herbaceous borders. But the increasing taste for country life under all sorts of conditions, especially those which tend to health, has brought hillsides into fashion, with their promise of more distant views and fresher air, and to a tyro in gardening a hillside domain presents aliaost in- surmountable obstacles. How can anything homelike

or beautiful be made of a garden needing walls and steps ? Stone and mortar are unsightly things until age shall mellow them and decay set her kindly finger upon their hard, unyielding surfaces. But it is here that the artist and the expert steps in. "Nothing is prettier or pleasanter," writes Miss Jekyll on her first page, "than all the various ways of terraced treatment that may be practised with the help of dry-walling, that is to say, rough wall building without mortar." By keeping the paths as nearly level as may be many beautiful garden pictures may be made, and the steps leading from terrace to terrace, which present terrible diffi- culties to the ignorant, are to Miss Jekyll only so many more opportunities of the greatest artistic value :—

" There is no reason or excuse for the steep, ugly, and even dangerous steps one so often sees. Unless the paths come too close together on the upper and lower terraces, space for the more easy gradient can be cut away above and where the stairway cuts through the bank and is lined on each side with dry-walling, the whole structure becomes a garden of delightful small things. Little ferns are planted in the joints on the • Wall and Water Gardens. By Gertrude Jekyll. "The country Lee Library." London : George Newnes. [12s. 6d.1 sbadier side as the wall goes up, and numbers of small Saxi- frages and Stonecrops, pennywort and Grine:, Conde/. is. and Sand wort. Then there will be hanging sheets of Autrietta and Bock Pinks, Iberia and Cerastium, and many another pretty hint that will find happy home in the cool shelter of the rocky

joint."

With such decoration the out-of-doors staircase becomes a sheet of colour lined and carpeted with tiny patterns of leaf and flower. To most beginners the usual way of treating sloping ground is with grass banks, which in Miss Jekyll's eyes are "profitless and indefensible." And, no doubt, when our eyes are opened, grass banks are supremely uninteresting, and few will regret their disappearance, least of all the gardener, who finds them difficult to mow. But if they must be retained in some already made gardens, they may be clothed with plants such as creeping cotoneaster or Japan

honeysuckle, or with bushes of savin, Pyrus Japonica, cistus, or berberia. Fortunately, in most gardens mistakes are not irremediable. It takes a long time to realise all the possibili-

ties of the ground. The first year we think, if we make a good plan, that patience is all that is needed for entire success. It is the succeeding years which disclose to us how little that success is, and we are tempted, like bad workmen, to complain of impossible materials. Here, then, comes in the value and

delight of a book like this. Miss Jekyll, as it were, takes us by the hand, and shows us how the straight terrace and steep places and bard dry walls may blossom as a rose, and up and

down the stone steps our feet walk on a carpet of moss and verdure, while bridal flowers are strewn in our path, and sweet-scented things are at our side to pick. To Miss Jekyll a stone staircase is a place for tender small things to take root. They must not be allowed to invade the middle place, lest the sense of welcome to the coming guest be inter- fered with, "bat the presence of such plants gives a keen delight to the flower-lover, even though his sympathies with architecture may tell him that for plants to be in such a place is technically wrong." Personally, we think the clothing of steps with flowers may easily go too far, especially when they are steps connected with terraces near the house, rather than with garden paths. Steps unadorned, if they lead up to the house, give a greater sense of the seemly order which should reign in the actual domain itself, but at present the danger lies in doing too little rather than too much.

From dry walls and steps we gladly turn in the "dog days" to the water gardens, which appeal quite as much to Miss Jekyll. Pools and streams and even little tanks can all be made things of joy if properly treated. Here also the artist will be needed to see when to plant and when to leave Nature to herself. In a chapter called "When to Let Well Alone' Miss Jekyll describes two places differing greatly from each other where there should be no planting by man. One is given in an illustration of a noble house in South Middle England. Its name is withheld, but many will recognise its beauty of wall and water. "The great building is reflected in the still water, and the natural water margin, without any artificial planting, is wisely left alone. It is all so solemn, so dignified, that any fussiness of small detail, "however beautiful in itself, is a kind of desecration." The other is a wild forest pool, which "being in itself beautiful, and speaking direct to our minds of the poetry of the woodland, it would be an ill deed to mar its perfection by any meddlesome gardening • Wood sorrel or wood anemone might be added if absent ; but nothing that would recall the garden." But there are many places which cry aloud for kindly planting. Small ponds or pools may be made beautiful with such common things as the great water dock, growing to the height of 6 ft., and the great water plantain. The great reeds and reedmace, bulrushes, especially the flowering rush, produce striking effects, while water-loving irises and sweet sedges will not be forgotten. Rhododendrons alone among plants often grown by water edges are forbidden by Miss Jekyll, and, we thoroughly agree with her. The home of

rhododendrons are picked places in the garden and woodland, and in this last they must be planted with a judicious hand and eye if they are to look the least naturaL One most

charming chapter is devoted to what we might almost call the life history of a stream from the nursery to where it becomes in its full maturity part of Nature's own home. It begins, perhaps, with lowly forget-me-note and modest meadow-sweet, and passes through more showy planting

with Japanese iris, king- fern, and -other companion.plants ; but as the stream grows in volume tall yellow and red loosestrife lead on to clumps of alders, where the ' giant cow-parsnip, with its less known brother, Heracleum lifante• gazzianum, and the native butter-bur (Petasites), are good neighbours. If a path is cut by such a stream it must wander round the various clumps, and in no way resemble a towing. path. Nature abhors a straight line, and when we are dealing with Nature's darlings—streams and woods—it behoves us to walk warily.

But to few is it given to need the warning. Our lot is more often cast among tanks and feeble imitations of ponds. But Miss Jekyll does not despise such things. Even here she can change despair into delight, and make water-lilies grow in tanks hardly bigger than a pint-pot. In gardening all things are possible to her, and with her books in hand no amateur, however ignorant, need have an ugly spot in his garden. At the end of each chapter on the various kinds of wall, rock, and stream gardens is a list of plants suitable for the purpose. For wall gardens she gives some hundred and fifty names, and for the Alpine garden, which to the ordinary amateur gardener is but little developed, she gives as many again, and all this without trenching on what is even more familiar to her,—the herbaceous garden and woodland proper. The present volume covers ground so rarely dealt with, and covers it with a practical' know- ledge so exceptional, that it is almost with a smile that we read in the preface that the author writes as an amateur for amateurs. And yet this is true. If Miss Jekyll is an expert it is by exercising her natural talents, not through cultivating a garden for professional purposes. And, there- fore, she is eminently suited to instruct the amateur. What she has accomplished we, too, might hope to do if we brought the same natural gifts and, above all, the same patient thought and intelligent industry to bear on the subject. If, in our small degree, we succeed in producing work as honest as hers, we shall be helping to keep alive the best traditions of English country life, whether in beautiful and stately domains or in humble cottage homes.

It will be seen that we have made no criticism on the scientific side of Miss Jekyll's book. Whether the plants she recommends for their several purposes are those best suited to them must be left for garden experts to decide. Differences of climate and treatment develop differently the qualities of the same plant. To us has fallen the more gracious task of speaking of the book on its artistic side. We have been obliged to leave much unnoticed, much unpraised, but no one can read it without realising that Eden is not wholly a thing of the past, and that God's call to tend a garden is the happiest, as well as the oldest, lot which can fall to man.