It seems almost useless to describe my garden. Though I myself am so very fond of it, there is no reason anyone else should understand why I love it; and when I read the description of the gardens that other people love, I wonder I can bear with it at all. It is surrounded, as I said before, with large forest trees; and that most objectionable of conifers, a Wellingtonia, grows almost in the middle of the garden. I cannot cut it down, as this would deprive the lawn-tennis ground of the only shade it has. How I long to turn that lawn-tennis ground into a sunk Dutch garden, with its low red wall all round it! Yet I know I should miss them very much if I no longer heard the cries of the lawn-tennis game or the more recent click of the croquet-balls. The top of the low wall, in front of the south side of the house, is a long bed of Tea Roses. Mr. Robinson names all the best sorts, so I need not do so. They do not flourish very well with us, I confess, and yet certainly better than any other Roses. It is their first flowering in June that is not very good. From August to October they are a great delight, flowering at intervals during all that time, and sending up long lovely shoots of brown leaves, that one can gather without scruple, as they are sure to be injured by the winter frosts; and the more the blooms are cut, the more they flower. At the other side of the lawn-tennis ground I have a little rockery, the system of which I can recommend to anyone who wants room and various aspects for plants without blocking out the rest of the garden or the distance beyond. We dug a large deep hole in the ground, carrying up gradually a small irregular path to the level of the ground on each side, roughly placing pieces of flat stone on each side of the path (to form steps) and all round the hole at the bottom. We kept the earth from falling by facing it with a wall of stones, stuck flatly and irregularly into the earth; this makes an excellent cool and deep root-bed for many Alpine and other plants. When it rains, there is a natural tendency for the water to drain down in all directions into the hole at the bottom. This hole had been dug deeper in the middle, and puddled with a little clay, not cement; and large stones were laid in the bottom, to retain the water longer than it naturally would remain in our sand. For really dry weather some pipes are laid on undergound to a tap in another part of the garden, from which the water runs into a tub at the top of the rockery for watering, and the overflow falls into the hole. In this way our tiny water-bed is kept moist in the dryest weather.

We grow in the water one of the most beautiful of our river plants, the Banunculus lingua, or Water Buttercup. It has a noble growth and large, shining, yellow flowers, which bloom for a long time. Its only fault is that, if given the position it likes, it grows and increases with weed-like rapidity, and in a small space must be ruthlessly thinned out when it begins to grow in spring, and often later as well. We have in the hole Japanese Primulas and Japanese Iris (Kempferi), though they do not flower as well as in the dry bed above, which is the hottest, dryest, most sunny place in the garden; and the only attention they get, after being planted in good leaf mould, is some copious waterings when the flower-buds are formed. They have the largest, finest flowers I have ever seen in England. I must not forget our native Forget-me-nots, which, Tennyson says, 'grow for happy lovers.' It is a much more persistent flowerer than the garden kind. In his 'Lancashire Garden' Mr. Bright praises very much the Primula japonica, and nothing can be more charming and unusual than the whorled growth of its flower-stems. He calls the blossoms crimson; I call them dark magenta-at any rate, they have that purple tinge which spoils so many reds. Where they really look well is in a moist ditch or on the damp half-shaded edge of a wood. If the ground is prepared for them, and the white kind planted too, they sow themselves in endless variety of tone from dark to light; but they are not especially suited for beds or mixing with other plants, and from their colour are not worth growing in pots.

All round the top of the hole described above is a raised bed, left irregular in places from the throwing-up of the earth that was dug out. The whole thing is on a very small scale in my garden, but it partakes slightly of the nature of the rockeries at Kew, which anyone interested in this kind of gardening can see, and by seeing learn. The great point of making a rockery is to have large mounds of good earth, and then lay stones on them, making terraces and little flat beds, stoned over to retain the moisture and prevent the earth being washed away. The old idea was to have stumps of trees or mounds of stones and brick, and then fill in the interstices with earth. This is no good at all; the plants have no depth of earth, and perish. The trouble of such gardening consists only in the constant hand-weeding that it requires. This must be done by someone more or less experienced, as very often the most precious plant looks like a small weed, while in other cases many planted things are no better than weeds if left alone, and quickly choke and destroy all their less vigorous neighbours.

Weeding! What it means to us all! The worry of seeing the weeds, the labour of taking them up, the way they flourish at busy times, and the dangers that come from zeal without knowledge! When we first went to live in the country, an affectionate member of the family, who hates weeds and untidiness of all kinds, set to work to tear up ruthlessly every annual that had been sown, and with pride said, 'At any rate, I have cleared that bit of ground.' Weeding, if tiring, is also a fascinating employment; and so is spudding. The first is best done in dry weather, the second in moist. I am all for reducing lawns and turf, except for paths, in small gardens; but what there is of grass should be well kept, and free from weeds. A quantity of daisies showing up their white faces, though pretty in theory, are in fact very unbecoming to the borders on a sunshiny summer's day.