Through it the bulbs push, and both flower at the same time. Thus my
brilliant tulips, snowy narcissus poeticus, golden daffodils, rise above
and among a sheet of blue or pink--one or the other to match their
hue--and look infinitely more beautiful on that ground colour. I venture
to say, indeed, that no garden on earth can be more lovely than mine
while the forget-me-not and the bulbs are flowering together. This may
be a familiar practice, but I never met with it elsewhere.
Another wild scheme I recollect. Water-plants need no attention. The
most skilful horticulturist cannot improve, the most ignorant cannot
harm them. I seriously proposed to convert my lawn into a tank two feet
deep lined with Roman cement and warmed by a furnace, there to grow
tropical nymphaea, with a vague "et cetera." The idea was not so
absolutely mad as the unlearned may think, for two of my relatives were
first and second to flower _Victoria Regia_ in the open-air--but they
had more than a few feet of garden. The chances go, in fact, that it
would have been carried through had I been certain of remaining in
England for the time necessary. Meanwhile I constructed two big tanks of
wood lined with sheet-zinc, and a small one to stand on legs. The
experts were much amused. Neither fish nor plant, they said, could live
in a zinc vessel. They proved to be right in the former case, but
utterly wrong in the latter--which, you will observe, is their special
domain.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25