A YEAR IN A LANCASHIRE GARDEN. BY HENRY A. BRIGHT. SECOND EDITION. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879. The Right of Translation is Reserved. LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL....

This volume is but a collection of Notes, which, at the request of the editor, I wrote, month by month, in 1874, for the columns of the Gardeners' Chronicle . They pretend to little technical knowledge, and are, I fear, of but little horticultural value. They contain only some slight record of a year's work in a garden, and of those associations which a garden is so certain to call up. As, however, I found that this monthly record gave pleasure to readers, to whom both the garden and its owner w

Introductory—The House—The Latest Flowers—The Arbutus—Chrysanthemums—Fallen Leaves—Planting—The Apple-room—The Log-house—Christmas. December 3. —These notes are written for those who love gardens as I do, but not for those who have a professional knowledge of the subject; and they are written in the hope that it may not be quite impossible to convey to others some little of the delight, which grows (more certainly than any bud or flower) from the possession and management of a garden. I cannot,

Gardening Blunders—The Walled Garden and the Fruit Walls—Spring Gardening—Christmas Roses—Snowdrops—Pot Plants. January 5. —What wonderful notions some people have about gardens! In a clever novel I have just been reading, there occurs this description:—"The gardens at Wrexmore Hall were in a blaze of beauty, with Geraniums and Chrysanthemums of every hue." In the published letters of Mr. Dallas, who was formerly United States' Minister here, there is something still more marvellous. He had been

Frost—The Vineries and Vines—Early Forcing—Orange-trees—Spring Work—Aconites—The Crocus. February 6. —We have had no morning so beautiful this winter. A clear, bright frost is in the air, and on the grass, and among the trees. Not a spray but is coated with crystals, white as snow and thick as moss; not a leaf of Holly or of Ivy but is fringed with frosted fretwork. There is not a breath of wind, and the birds, that were singing yesterday, have all vanished out of sight. It is wonderfully beauti

The Rookery—Daffodils—Peach Blossoms—Spring Flowers—Primroses—Violets—The Shrubs of Spring. March 6. —We have a tradition, or, if you will, a superstition, in this part of the world, that rooks always begin to build on the first Sunday in March. Last year my rooks were punctual to a day. This year, although they began a day or two earlier, it was not till the morning of Sunday the 1st that they showed real activity. Then the belt of trees which they frequent, and which for want of any better nam

The Herbaceous Beds—Pulmonaria—Wallflowers—Polyanthus—Starch Hyacinths—Sweet Brier—Primula Japonica—Early Annuals and Bulbs—The Old Yellow China Rose. April 4. —Is any moment of the year more delightful than the present? What there is wanting in glow of colour is more than made up for in fulness of interest. Each day some well-known, long-remembered plant bursts into blossom on the herbaceous borders, and brings with it pleasant associations of days that are no more, or of books that cannot die.

Ants and Aphis—Fruit Trees—The Grass Walk—"Lilac-tide"—Narcissus—Snowflakes—Columbines—Kalmias—Hawthorn Bushes. May 4. —May set in this year with (as Horace Walpole somewhere says) "its usual severity." We felt it all the more after the soft warm summer weather we had experienced in April. The Lilac, which is only due with us on the 1st of May, was this year in flower on the 28th of April. Green Gooseberry tarts, which farther south are considered a May-day dish, we hardly hope to see in this co

The Summer Garden—The Buddleia—Ghent Azaleas—The Mixed Borders—Roses—The Green Rose. July 13. —There is a longer interval than usual since my last notes; but I have been away among the Soldanellas and the Gentians of Switzerland, and I have had to leave my garden to the gardener's care. Now that I have returned, I find how much has gone on, and how much I must have missed. The Nemophila bed, I hear, gradually filled up and became a perfect sheet of brilliant blue. The Anemone bed was very good,

The Fruit Crop—Hautbois Strawberries—Lilium Auratum—Sweet Williams—Carnations—The Bedding-out. August 15. —It is, I find, a dangerous thing to leave a garden masterless for even a month. The best of gardens will probably fall short in some respect, and I certainly discover several matters which would have been otherwise had I remained at home. My readers will hardly be interested by the details of my grievances; it is pleasanter to tell where we have been successful. The wall fruit, however, I m

Weeds—Tomatos—Tritomas—Night-scented Flowers—Tuberoses—Magnolia—Asters—Indian Corn. September 4. —"The rain it raineth every day." It finds its way through the old timbers of my first vinery, and the Grapes have to be cut out by dozens. It drenches the Pelargoniums and Verbenas, till their blossoms are half washed away. It soaks the petals of the great Lilies, and turns them into a sickly brown. The slugs, I suppose, like it, for they crawl out from the thick Box hedges and do all the harm they

St. Luke's Summer—The Orchard—The Barberry—White Haricot Beans—Transplanting—The Rockery. October 15. —This is St. Luke's summer, or the "Indian summer" as it is called in America. The air is soft and warm and still. The yellow leaves fall from the Beeches in countless numbers, but slowly and noiselessly, and as if reluctant to let go their hold. The rooks come back to us again across the fields, and clamour among the empty nests, which were their homes in spring. The "remontant" Roses are putti

The Wood and the Withered Leaves—Statues—Sun-dials—The Snow—Plans for the Spring—Conclusion. November 7. —The soft autumn weather still spares what flowers the rains have left us, and here and there are signs as if of another spring. Violets along the grass walks, Strawberries in flower, and to-day a little yellow Brier Rose blossoming on an almost leafless spray, remind us of the early months of the year that is no more. But here, too, are some of the flowers of November. The Arbutus has again

Flowering Shrubs—Yuccas—Memorial Trees—Ranunculus—Pansies—Canna Indica—Summer Flowers—Bluets—Fruit-blossoms and Bees—Strawberry Leaves—Garden Sounds—Mowing—Birds—The Swallow—Pleasures of a Garden. Almost more interesting than herbaceous plants are the flowering shrubs. Most beautiful of all, if, indeed, it may be called a shrub, is the Buddleia Globosa, in the inner garden, which I have already mentioned. When June draws to its close, it is laden with thousands of blossoms like little golden ora

I contributed the following note on "The Viola of the Romans," to the Gardeners' Chronicle of September 26, 1874, as I found a correspondent had been adopting Lord Stanhope's views. Mr. Ruskin in his Queen of the Air wrote, "I suspect that the flower whose name we translate 'Violet' was in truth an Iris" (he is speaking of the Greek ion , but the Viola no doubt is whatever the ion was). In Lord Stanhope's Miscellanies , second series, which was published in 1872, a paper, which had been previous

I was much pleased to see my observations on the Azalea as a fly-catcher confirmed by a subsequent paragraph (October 3, 1874,) in the Gardeners' Chronicle . It is interesting, and I now reprint it. Azalea Viscosa a Fly-catcher. Under this heading Mr. W. W. Bailey gives the following observations in the current number of the American Naturalist :— "The many curious observations published of late in regard to vegetable fly-catchers have opened my eyes to such phenomena as are presented in my fore

It is very curious to compare the two following passages of two great masters of style—Ruskin and Michelet—both writing of the tribe to which belongs the Tomato. Ruskin, in The Queen of the Air , p. 91, says:— "Next, in the Potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem of one of a tribe set aside for evil, having the deadly nightshade for its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst natural curse of modern civilisation—tobacco. And the strange thing about th

I have been much puzzled to know what was the Sunflower of classical story,—in other words, what was the flower into which, according to the legend, Clytie was so sadly changed. I had always supposed, as nearly every one supposes, that it was what we call the Sunflower (the Helianthus), with its upright stem and large radiated disc. But, first of all, I found, as a matter of fact, that the Helianthus does not follow the course of the Sun, and that various blossoms of the same plant may at the sa

Both the flowers of the garden and what Campbell calls "wildings of nature" have had their bards, and in the case of certain flowers the association with a poet is so strong that the sight of the flower will recall the verse. Of course this is chiefly so as regards the less familiar flowers. No one, not even Sappho, has an exclusive possession in the Rose; but who would care to dispute Shelley's right to the Sensitive Plant, or Wordsworth's to the lesser Celandine? The poets, however, have somet