In an ambitious garden, where exotics abound, it -is a
rather terrifying experience to make the rounds of inspection after such a frost. Shrubs that are on the edge of hardiness, such as many varieties of ceanothus or Camellia, or insufficiently protected roots as of chrysanthemum, may be killed outright, though the facts will not be known for weeks. In my garden that common but useful hardy and early-flowering plant, the lungwort, was shrivelled into brown brittleness, the plants look beyond recovery ; but .above it, showing no sort of acknowledgment that anything was unusual, a Daphne Mezereum continued to flower in exceptional profusion-
Even privets, Buddleias, and winter jasmine and ceanothus (glaire de Versailles), were severely cut and looked miserable ; and that frost-lover, the snowdrop, was browned. Yet primroses continued to bloom as if nothing had happened, There will be victims among the tenderer shrubs, and here and there things as hardy as laurel and gorse were half killed ; but we may say that this untimely visitation has done much less harm than might have been expected ; and those thousands of homely cottage gardeners who regard Good Friday and the following days as the high festival of seed- sowing (what a suggestive symbol this is I) look forward to a perfect seed bed and a well-crumbled soil. Many of them have an almost superstitious belief in the fertilizing influence of snow ; and in the hardening effect of frost on their fruit trees. * * * *
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