In the Garden
One of the best gardeners I ever met—he was a French- man and a master of his craft—used to sow his sweet peas in earth contained by a circle of a broad wooden shaving. These he transferred to the open garden when the due season arrived, and the roots of the young plant were thus undisturbed. The shaving itself virtually vanished. Another rather similar
device is to set each seed in a square of inverted turf. Gar- deners are full of little ingenious devices. One makes most of his garden furniture, from bird-baths to large flower-pots, out of concrete poured into his own moulds. He has made the whole of a charming water-garden in this cheap and easy fashion. Another puts the wooden pergola poles into large drain-pipes, filling up the space with concrete, and his posts last indefinitely. A certain large and very cheap fruit cage was constructed by the gardener out of old boiler-pipes; and these are often procurable for a song. At the same time, more easily transferable posts and bars can now be bought at moderate prices. Among mechanical devices may be men- tioned the use of a very wide-meshed, strong-stringed net for fixing over a carnation bed. It serves admirably (in lieu of individual tying to stakes) to hold the flowering stems upright, and it may be singularly inconspicuous. Many of us, like W. H. Davies, hate to see numbers of plants tied up.
W. BEACH THOMAS.
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