OCTOBER IN THE PARKS.
THE London chestnut-trees clothe themselves with green
earlier in the spring than chestnut-trees in the colder country winds, and for that reason, doubtless, undress them- selves earlier in the autumn. In a dry season September ends most of them in a shower of yellow. This year the end has come more gradually in rain, but the contrast between the London parks and the country gardens remains the same, with the chestnut-trees standing bare as in winter above herbaceous borders still opening new flowers. Regent's Park shows the contrast clearest. The chestnuts, of course, are not the only trees whose leaves have fallen ; the limes are bare, and none of the others have kept the deep summer green which is still set in the country elms and poplars ; but it is the chestnuts which in Regent's Park insist most on their naked boughs and next year's sticky brown buds. Chestnuts line most of the broad walk on which the park gardeners chiefly spend their energies, and they look strangely forlorn in sunshine or rain. In the wonderful sunlight of last Tuesday morning, for instance, or in the tempestuous showers of the morning of Wednesday, the trees might belong to any month from October to March ; the flowers, many of them, to mid-June. The science of bedding-out has reached a stage, like the science of rose-growing, when gardeners deliberately calculate for autumn effects ; their forerunners were content with flowers for summer only. The last week in October, doubt- less, will see most of the beds empty; but the middle of the month could still show some fine effects, particularly in the beds arranged with higher blossoming plants such as cannas and fuchsias. The finest effect of all which lasted into autumn has perhaps been the large clump of agaves and opuntias arranged on a mound with several slopes, with sedums and a crimson-flowering mesembryanthemum grouped for a carpet below them. September, no doubt, saw stronger depths of colour in the flowers, but the grace and vigour of the foliage remained to the end.
Regent's Park has the best show-ground of the parks for flowers at any season of the year. In Hyde Park the beds lying along the railings south of Grosvenor Gate are set too formally in a line to give the gardener his proper chances. In Hyde Park the gardener can take his visitor, as it were, along a picture-gallery, and show him one bed of flowers after another, each bed admirable in itself, but wanting the atmosphere of a garden. Park Lane clamours through the railings; motor-omnibuses roar down the slope of the road; the flowers are isolated between parallel roads. In Regent's Park the visitor walks in a garden, with flowers in front of him, behind him, at his side; the gardener can think out succeeding vistas of flowers. He has his best chance, we think, in the earlier months of the year, when crocuses are spread like a film over lawns and dells, and when later lie can choose any contrasts he pleases with tulips and hyacinths and daffodils in the beds and borders. Not even Kew Gardens draw a London crowd as does Regent's Park in May ; you may join in the stream of sightseers and come away with memories rather too curiously mixed of opening chestnut- leaves, full sunshine, cigar-smoke and the scent of tulips. But October, too, has flowers proper to the month, and in Regent's Park you may see them at their best ; chrysanthemums massed in broad splashes of maroon and sea-shell pink, canary-yellow and ruddy bronze ; dahlias noble and rotund, old-fashioned dahlias as round and stiff as Normandy pippins, each petal a cup to hold crystal on rainy days and earwigs on any day ; dahlias of new fashions, paeony-flowered, star- flowered, flowered like great crimson daisies. The chry- santhemums could hardly be better ; but the flower which you miss from the London garden is the rose. Rose-growers for years have been succeeding better and better with autumn- blossoming roses, but here, in the most open spaces of London, there is scarcely a red or white petal to be seen. Roses do excellently at Kew ; does the extra nearness of the London smoke choke them in the parks ? Tradition perhaps still lingers a little longer than it should. In bedding out you can try new experiments every year if you choose, but an experi- ment with roses is an affair of more than one season. You would only begin to get the best effects from the ramblers some five or six years after planting.
Hyde Park seems to succeed with certain flowers a little better than Regent's Park ; or possibly Regent's Park, with those particular flowers, does not try. Regent's Park, for one of its latest autumn effects, had a delightfully careless patch of yellow violas and sedum spectabile, which should have attracted all the peacock and red admiral and tortoise- shell butterflies for miles, had there been any to attract. Hyde Park is of necessity more formal, but the row of beds by Park Lane has held into the October rains better fuchsias, pink and white, than their northern neighbours, and there have been two other beds, one of scarlet " Britannia" carna- tions, and the other of a fine white Bouvardia, which would win prizes in any inter-park competitions. Perhaps in October, before all the bedding-plants are removed, and the four chief parks north of the river are brought down to the same level of grass, gravel, and trees, you realise best how much of the energy of each park goes to gardening. Regent's Park must always come first, if only because it comes nearest to the quiet of a garden, and because it lays out so much of its grass as mown lawn. The Green Park would come last; the park with the prettiest name and the least respectable appearance,—on days, at all events, when the green of it is dry enough to serve as the resting-place of persons who do not happen to be engaged in manual or other labour. The Green Park can spread very delicate carpets of crocuses in March ; but after March and the daffodils the gardening falters. In October the green has become pasture for sheep ; the dingiest and blackest sheep, surely, that ever leapt iron palings or stood unconcernedly about among nursemaids and perambu- lators. But of Hyde Park and St. James's Park, to which would the impartial gardener award the prize P Both have the opportunity provided by water and banks running down to the water's edge for striking effects in landscape garden, and neither takes full advantage of it ; both seem to prefer their wild fowl, which like sunny stretches of bank to doze upon, and which would make no gardener's task the easier.
Perhaps St. James's, next to Regent's Park, has the greatest opportunity, at all events for formal gardening, and possibly an October day such as last Tuesday can find the best measure of the success which the formal gardening has obtained. Until the Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace is completed it would be impossible to judge of the full value of any scheme of formal gardening and the colour scheme of surrounding flower-beds. But enough of the Memorial and the gateways on each side of it is now visible or in position to enable a guess, at least, to be taken as to what is likely to look best. The St. James's Park gardener has guessed well. He has seen that the bard outlines of the stone pillars and the uncompromising whiteness of the marble fountain in the centre, standing out against the sombre Palace and the shining gilt of the Palace railings, forbid him anything but the simplest and most enduring effect of colour. He has rightly chosen for his flower-beds an unmixed stretch of scarlet pelargoniums, and the result is as brilliant and as correct as a uniform. indeed, it is a result which should fit with uniforms, for uniforms are always with it. On Tuesday, for instance, a day of the brightest October sunlight, a few minutes only in the neighbourhood of the Memorial justified the gardener's simple choice to the full. Up the Mall rode a half-company of Life Guards, white and scarlet and silver ; down Birdcage Walk, on his way to Westminster, came the Lord Chancellor in full robes in his brougham; and under the trees of St. James's Park in the distance strayed and strolled a group of scarlet-cloaked charity-school children. With those reminders of the pageantries and formalities of the past, there should be no room in the neighbourhood for ultra-modern experiments in garden-bedding ; the Georgian and Victorian pelargoniums alone should suit the abiding stone.
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