MODERN GARDENING.'

GARDENS are becoming yearly more cosmopolitan, for they are filled with the floral and herbaceous inhabitants of many

• (I.) The Bamboo Garden. By A. B. Freeman•M.tford, 0.B. London : Macmillan and Co —(2 ) The Flora of the Alps. By Alfred W. Bennett. London: John C. Nimmo.

countries. The modern gardener, says Mr. Freeman.Mitford, sets as much store on beauty of form as on beauty of colour, and the bamboo, for which he pleads so eloquently, satisfies, with its graceful pointed foliage and waving growth, every demand of the lover of form. Though there seems some difficulty as yet in classifying and naming the varieties of bamboos, there are nearly fifty hardy types from which the landscape-gardener may choose those best suited to the ground at his disposal. This uncertainty of nomenclature is due to the rarity of flower and seed among these plants, and to the apparent similarity in the foliage and manner of growth. The nursery-gardeners have labelled varieties wrongly.

"Even at Kew," the home of horticulture, "Phyllostachys bambusoides was for years represented by a magnificent plant of P. viridi-glaucescens," and Mr. Freeman-Mitford goes on to say that this particular Phyllostachys bambu.soicles assumed so many shapes that he began to look on it as the "Mrs. Harris

of Bamboos," and to doubt whether there really was " sich a person." It seems still a doubtful point whether the bamboo necessarily dies after the time of flowering and fruiting. It is a picturesque theory at least that a whole forest of bamboos may live for twenty or thirty years without flowering, and that when the fatal year of fruiting comes the infection spreads from one tract to another—nay, even from one quarter of the globe to another—and that after the appearance of flower and seed the bamboo dies down and rapidly perishes. It exemplifies the idea that Ruskin elaborates in an early essay of hie, where he argues that "the power of reproduction involves the necessity of death in many ways If the trees first created on the earth were to be imperishable, there was no necessity for a power in them of creating others," that is, they would have been created without flower and without seed. Mr. Freeman-Mitford quotes authorities to show that the question of the death of bamboos after flowering is at least an open one, and sums up his case by declaring that, "on the whole, modern opinion appears to incline to the belief that the older botanists and travellers came to rather hasty conclusions in this matter, which could only be deter- mined by protracted observations on the spot." Moreover, he himself gathered seed last year (1895) from a bamboo culm that had flowered in a Surrey garden, and from his own observation can certify that there were no signs of injury to the plant. Bamboos seem specially adapted to our climate because they flourish in sea-mists, but they need shelter from the winds that blow round and over our islands, especially from the cutting easterly or north-easterly blasts. Mr.

Freeman-Mitford pleads most persuasively for the additional beauty that tropical or sub-tropical plants and trees lend to our home landscapes. The elms and chestnuts on which we pride ourselves so much are, after all, aliens, so are many of our familiar evergreens and pines. We admit every species of rare exotic into our flower-gardens, why should we exclude the hardier forms of tropical tree or shrub from our woods and shrubberies P He gives a charming idyll of the wood- land

"Farther up the hill there is a spot snugly screened from the cruel blasts which come from north and east Here, amid the sparkling glitter of a holly grove, are all manner of beautiful evergreens —rare pines, steepling fir-trees, rholo- dendrons, cypresses, junipers. A tiny rill trickles over the green velvet of the rocks, with ferns peeping out of crannies in which many an Alpine treasure is hushed to rest, waiting the warm kiss of spring and the song of the birds, that, like Orpheus with his lute, shall raise the seeming dead from the grave. Tall rushes, and gracefully arching bamboos, hardly stirred by the wind, nod their plumes over the little stream."

We commend the wisdom which leads a landscape-gardener like Mr. Freeman-Mitford to associate the " mysterious

vegetation of warm climates" with other evergreen plants and trees, for to our mind, though we f ally admire the graceful waving foliage of a clump of bamboos, we cannot help agreeing with Messrs. Riviere that Arundinaria japonica, for instance, has sometimes an aspect pea agr,i- able, especially in springtime, when its untidy winter

clothing is contrasted with the delicate new spring garments of our familiar deciduous trees and shrubs.

Mr. Freeman-Mitford is a genuine enthusiast on the subject of Japanese scenery, not so mach in the shape of the Japanese gardens as in those Nature's gardens where the results are part of the great scheme of vegeta- tion that is shown there in its perfection. We have so much enj-yed his chapter headed " Apologia pro

bambusis meis," that we have almost lost sight of the peg on which that "Apologia" is hung, and have pictured for ourselves the glories of " a great glen all besnowed with the tender bloom of Cherries and Peaches and Magnolias in spring, or blazing with the flames of the Maple to warm the chill October, and in its depths a great waterfall leaping from rock to rock for some hundreds of feet ! Here and there the soft brown thatch of some peasant's cottage, or the quaint eaves of a Buddhist temple, jut out from the hillside, while far down below you, are the emerald green patches of paddy- field, with great white cranes stalking about in solemn state."

In the same way Mr. Bennett's book on Alpine flowers must recall to every lover of Alpine fields and pastures Archbishop Trench's sonnet beginning,-

" How thick the wild flowers blow about our feet."

These two volumes contain classified accounts of all the wild flowers growing in Switzerland and in the mountainous parts of France, Italy, Austria, and the Pyrenees, and they will form comprehensive and delightful companions to every traveller who can appreciate such bewildering treasures of Nature. The illustrated work, Seboth's Alpine Plants, translated by Mr. Alfred Bennett, is probably well known to all botanists, but its size and its price deter the ordinary student, and no English or foreign handbook has apparently attempted such a comprehensive classification of all the plants that come under the head of "Alpine." The awakened interest in Alpine plants is due partly to the great facilities for modern travelling, and partly to the spread of knowledge of flowers and their cultivation which has marked the present century. At the fortnightly exhibitions of the Royal Horticultural Society, and particularly at the great annual -show in the Temple Gardens, rare treasures from the Pyrenees or from the distant Carpathians are shown, and all over the country

rock-gardens are filled with saxifrages and rock-roses and numbers of flowering plants that grow in abundant clumps, and display masses of brilliant colour. It is strange that our common purple bell-heather is not to be found in Switzerland, but on the other hand we have no

"Gentian-flower'd pass, its crown with yellow spires 1..u.ame," or pastures rosy with the bright Rhododendron ferru- gineum, though skill and patience will acclimatise them in our gardens, and in this temperate climate the in- habitants of Alpine districts will live aide by side with the graceful giant or pigmy bamboos of the eastern hemi- sphere. The herbaceous border and the indoor or out-of- door rockery are new fields of work for modern gardeners, and there is no doubt that beds of perennials are largely superseding the older-fashioned system of carpet-bedding- Mr. Freeman-Mitford has a sly allusion to Adam and Eve in Paradise, " before sin and carpet-bedding had been invented," and he also denounces the modern bores who cultivate micro- scopic portions of rare plants labelled with names twice as long as themselves, and those other bores who frequent flower-shows and fling " sesquipedalian names at their victims' heads with an air of conscious superiority." All the same, we feel grateful to the authors of both the books now before us for the careful index each has added to his labour of love. In The Bamboo Garden the illustrations are by Mr. Alfred Parsons, the well-known artist and illustrator of The Wild Garden, and add (considerably to the attractiveness of the volume, while Mr. Bennett gives a hundred and twenty plates of the leading types of Alpine plants, in most cases exceedingly faithfully coloured, besides adding a glossary of botanical terms to the exhaustive index of Latin and English names. We heartily commend both books to botanists and to those garden-lovers who may perhaps never see either- bamboos or typical Alpine plants growing in their native soils, but will welcome new varieties of both in their own insular fashion, and will set about transplanting them with the help of an accommodating climate and true British adaptability of character.