with what men call winter aconite, but gods, the new year's gift. This neat mosaic of bright colours is a bit of legerdemain. You have snowdrops, hepaticas, Van Thol tulips, hyacinths, crocuses, vernal squills, and a few other pretty things, all bedded on a carpet of brightest moss, and inclosed in a border of green rosettes-themselves the Pride of London in days of yore. The assemblage is small, select, and brilliant. Some of the coterie are slightly forced, and so plunged with their pots; and at dusk, a light wooden frame, like a Brobdignagian dish-cover, is placed over all to keep out mischief.

The next thing to display is our darling pet-the work of our own hands. In some spots among the neighbouring woods, on a black moory soil, the self-sown primroses sport into great variety of colour; hardly two are to be found alike. They pass from bright sulphur, through sad-coloured neutral tints, to orange, lilac, and vivid crimson. It was easy to have a bed filled with the proper soil, and at our leisure to search for specimens, trowel in hand, and transfer them to their final site. The mixture of a few choice plants inveigled out of cottage gardens, adds brilliancy by their more decided hues; but the best effect is obtained when the primroses are taken quite at random. There is even now (January) a pretty show, and has been since November; but in spring the green leaves will be hardly visible for the variously clouded colouring with which they are overtopped. In that sunny corner you will find violets in flower, though foliage only is to be seen; the single blue Russian, and the double pink. The patches of pulmonaria, with leaves of mottled green, and flowers changing from pink to blue, are not to be despised; and here is a charming little rarity now coming on, the double pilewort (Ranunculus ficaria); it has the usual gold-lacquered petals, with a centre like that of the double anemone. But there are two sorts of double anemones; those like the double pilewort, in which the stamens and pistils are converted into minute petals, and which belong to the spring garden-and the Kilkenny anemones, in which the number of true petals is multiplied, the parts of fructification remaining the same. These are a great help to make the winter garden gay. On a mild forenoon the bees will show you how glad they are to find them there. The wood-laurel, the Pyrus japonica, and wallflowers double and single, brown and yellow, are blossoming in abundance. We have accomplished something actual, instead of dreaming about impossibilities. Tis done! cries Thomson; but of the rest of his exclamation not a word can be agreed to

'dread Winter spreads his latest glooms, And reigns tremendous o'er the conquer'd year.

How

How dead the vegetable kingdom lies!

How dumb the tuneful! Horror wide extends

His desolate domain.'

Not so:--nothing more easy than to elicit a smile from the grimmest of the seasons. Both the red-breast and the thrush seem to enjoy the scene, and express their approval in music. The water's edge terminates our walk in this direction. Limited or artificial pieces of water never look brighter and more cheerful than in an open winter. An avenue of standard Portugal laurels-like those at Trentham, though on a modest scale-conducts us to a flight of stone steps. A glass door admits us to a conservatory-passage filled on each side with orange-trees, myrtles, cinerarias, Chinese primroses, and so on. Another glass-door is opened, and we are in the house again.

The extreme geographical limit at which horticultural practices have been carried on, is probably marked by Sir Edward Parry's cultivation of mustard and cress, 'sallets good for the scorbute,' while exploring that most fearful of cul de-sacs, the North-West Passage. This was certainly venturing to a high, if not a great latitude in gardening, and deserves to be remembered as one of a thousand instances of the benevolent wisdom habitually exercised by our great sea captains. Parry's ship is the Ultima Thule of kitchen as well as winter-gardens.

We may therefore be permitted to take a bold flight thence, and alight at once in Iceland. Here we have a country possessing no mere modern civilization, and we may suppose that horticulture has done its utmost, till Mr. Paxton erects a still grander miracle over the region of the Geysers, and that efficient boiler shall serve to grow things unseen before. At present olitory viands are the choicest of luxuries. Even in the middle of summer the inhabitants are exposed to so much snow, frost, and cold, as almost to prevent all cultivation. The vegetarians would have a difficulty in carrying out their dietary here. The Icelanders, at least, are not given to browsing; they are neither long-eared pachyderms nor blatant ruminants. Fish is their staff of life. The main population is ichthyophagous; rye-bread is only brought to the table of the superior class of people. Sir William Hooker says:

'Many of the houses in the town, as well as (though more rarely) those in the country, have small gardens attached to them, fenced in with high turf walls, and generally kept neat and free from weeds. Cabbages, especially the rutabaga, turnips, and potatoes, with sometimes a few carrots, are attempted, but never arrive at any great degree of perfection. Probably the best garden, both in point of soil and situation, in the town, was that of Mr. Savignac. Here we had, in

the

the month of August, good turnips about the size of an apple, and potatoes as large as the common Dutch. Radishes and turnip-radishes were very good in July and August. In other gardens, and especially out of the town, vegetation was extremely languid; and even in the month of August, when the cabbages ought to be in their best state, I was in many gardens where a half-crown piece would have covered the whole of the plant, and where potatoes and turnips came to nothing.'-Tour in Iceland, p. 25.

These difficulties would seem enough to baffle the most expert Fairservice that Dreepdaily ever sent out. Yet, in spite of all this, to show the force of imagination, there is extant a native work of renown, entitled, The Georgics of Iceland!- a fine poem,'-attesteth the reporter! As to the realities, Sir William's account is confirmed by a traveller of 1834:—

'Radishes and turnip-radishes, mustard and cress, seemed to thrive, and were looking pretty well in the governor's garden; but he bestowed much care and labour on his little piece of ground, and often took great pleasure in pointing out to me the healthy vigour of three or four plants of the mountain-ash, which (after I forget how many years' growth) had attained to the height of about four feet, and in the possession of which he prided himself not a little, assuring me that they were in fact the only plants that deserved the name of trees within many miles around Reikiavik. The gardens I am speaking of had apparently abundance of good soil, and were all in a sheltered situation, facing the south-west; and yet, one knows not why, under such favourable circumstances, everything in them appeared to be languishing. I do not recollect that we saw a cabbage-head at all in any part of our future journey; and yet when we were at Reikiavik, the weather in August was comparatively mild (Fahrenheit's thermometer fluctuating in the daytime from 49° to 63°), and nothing approaching to frost occurred during the short nights. If then there be not some other circumstance adverse to the growth of a far more hardy and vigorous vegetation, I should be disposed to ascribe the want of success to mismanagement.'-Barrow's Visit to Iceland, p. 106.

There is the rub-which we would try to settle one way or another, were we converted to Whiggery and honoured by some comfortable commisionership in the icy regions. A dinner without good vegetables is an imperfect affair; still they do their best to fill the hiatus: :

'The governor sat at the end of the table, and the Danish Prince on his right hand. The dinner was remarkably well served up, and there was a display of vegetables, poor enough, it must be admitted, but such as is seldom met with at a dinner-table in Reikiavik, and they were all the produce of the governor's garden.'-Ibid., p. 313.

Therefore there were no side-dishes composed of the native

vegetable

vegetable productions which are occasionally prepared for food, such as angelica and scurvy-grass, besides the two or three kinds of edible Fuci. A taste of the Lichen Islandicus should have been offered to the illustrious and erudite strangers, and also a sample of the Sol, the Fucus palmatus of Linnæus, which (according to Hooker, p. 37) is eaten either raw, with fish and butter, or boiled down in milk to a thick consistency, as is more common with people of property, who mix with it, if it can be afforded, a little flour of rye. The dandelion, too, is among the native plants of the island, and would stop a gap, either as a salad or a spinach: we ourselves have eaten it with relish, in spite of the rebellion of the cook and some Cassandric predictions of her betters.

Contrast with this sad instance of gardening under difficulties -heat being the grand desideratum-the 'watered gardens' of the East, where everything is unmanageably luxuriant, and coolness is the point of perfection for one's dream of bliss:

'A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard. Spikenard and saffron ; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.'

We learn, from Mr. Kinglake, the most brilliant, and, nevertheless, we suspect, about the most accurate of recent tour-sketchers, that these scenes remain unchanged since the day of the Wise King

This Holy Damascus, this Earthly Paradise of the prophet, so fair to his eyes that he dared not trust himself to tarry in her blissful shades-she is a city of hidden palaces, of copses, and gardens, and fountains, and bubbling streams. The juice of her life is the gushing and ice-cold torrent that tumbles from the snowy sides of AntiLebanon. Close along on the river's edge, through seven sweet miles of rustling boughs and deepest shade, the city spreads out her whole length as a man falls flat, face forward on the brook, that he may drink and drink again, so Damascus, thirsting for ever, lies down with her lips to the stream, and clings to its rushing waters.

'Wild as the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England, but without its sweet sadness, is the sumptuous garden of Damascus. Forest-trees tall and stately enough, if you could see their lofty crests, yet lead a tustling life of it below, with their branches struggling against strong numbers of bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side all down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of

roses,

roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath. The rose trees which I saw were all of the kind we call damask; they grow to an immense height and size. There are no other flowers. Here and there, there are patches of ground made clear from the cover, and these are either carelessly planted with some common and useful vegetable, or else are left free to the wayward ways of nature, and bear rank weeds, moist-looking and cool to your eyes, and freshening the sense with their earthy and bitter fragrance. There is a lane opened through the thicket, so broad in some places that you can pass along side by side-in some so narrow (the shrubs are for ever encroaching) that you ought, if you can, to go on the first and hold back the bough of the rose-tree. And through this wilderness there tumbles a loud rushing stream, which is halted at last in the lowest corner of the garden, and then tossed up in a fountain by the side of the simple alcove. This is all. Never for an instant will the people of Damascus attempt to separate the idea of bliss from these wild gardens and rushing waters.' -Eöthen, pp. 392–398.

Our panorama might be endless-beating the American monsters into nothingness; but we must hurry on, still eastward, and will next take a peep at China. We quote from the very interesting little volume of Mr. Fortune, one of the horticultural missionaries already alluded to, and, without doubt, among the most intelligent of his class:

6

The gardens of the mandarins in the city of Ning-po are very pretty; they contain a choice selection of the ornamental trees and shrubs of China, and generally a considerable number of dwarf trees. Many of the latter are really curious examples of the patience and ingenuity of this people. Some are only a few inches high, and yet seem hoary with age. Not only are they trained to represent old trees in miniature, but some are made to resemble the fashionable pagodas of the country, and others different kinds of animals, amongst which the deer seems to be the favourite. Junipers are generally chosen for the latter purpose, as they can be more readily bent into the desired form; the eyes and tongue are added afterwards-and the representation altogether is really good. When I was travelling on the hills of Hong-kong, a few days after my first arrival, I met with a most curious dwarf Lycopodium, which I dug up and carried down to Messrs. Dent's garden. Hai-yah! said the old compradore, and was in raptures of delight. All the coolies and servants gathered round the basket to admire this curious little plant. I had not seen them evince so much gratification since I showed them the Old Man Cactus (Cereus senilis), which I took out from England, and presented to a Chinese nurseryman at Canton. On asking them why they prized the Lycopodium so much, they replied, in Canton-English,- Oh, he too muchia handsome; he grow only a leete and a leete every year; and suppose he be one hundred year oula, he only so high,-holding up

their