Last Words: A Final Collection of StoriesEwing, Juliana Horatia
General
Last Words: A Final Collection of Stories
Ewing, Juliana Horatia
Children's stories; Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
To return to stone edgings. When quite newly laid, like miniature
rockwork, they are, perhaps, the least bit cockneyfied, and suggestive
of something between oyster-shell borderings and mock ruins. But this
effect very rapidly disappears as they bury themselves in cushions of
pink catch-fly (v. _compacta_), or low-growing pinks, tiny campanulas,
yellow viola, London pride, and the vast variety of rock-plants,
"alpines," and low-growing "herbaceous stuff," which delight in
squeezing up to a big cool stone that will keep a little moisture for
their rootlets in hot summer weather. This is a much more interesting
kind of edging than any one kind of plant can make, I think, and in a
Little Garden it is like an additional border, leaving the other free
for bigger plants. If one kind is preferred, for a light soil there is
nothing like thrift. And the white thrift is very silvery and more
beautiful than the pink. There is a large thrift, too, which is
handsome. But I prefer stones, and I like varieties of color--bits of
gray boulder, and red and yellow sandstone.
I like warm color also on the walks. I should always have red walks if
I could afford them. There is a red material, the result of some
process of burning, which we used to get in the iron and coal
districts of Yorkshire, which I used to think very pretty, but I do
not know what it is called.
Good walks are a great luxury. It is a wise economy to go round your
walks after rain and look for little puddles; make a note of where the
water lodges and fill it up. Keep gratings swept. If the grating is
free and there is an overflow not to be accounted for, it is very
possible that a drain-pipe somewhere is choke-full of the roots of
some tree.
Some people advise hacking up your walks from time to time, and other
people advise you not. Some people say there is nothing like salt to
destroy walk weeds and moss, and brighten the gravel, and some people
say that salt in the long run feeds the ground and the weeds. I am
disposed to think that, in a Little Garden, there is nothing like a
weeding woman with an old knife and a little salt afterwards. It is
also advisable to be your own weeding woman, that you may be sure that
the weeds come up by the roots! Next to the cast-iron back before
mentioned, I recommend a housemaid's kneeling mat (such as is used for
scrubbing floors), as a gardener's comfort.
I hope, if you have been bulb planting, that you got them all in by
Lord Mayor's Day. Whether bulbs should be planted deep or shallow is
another "vexed question." In a Little Garden, where you don't want to
disturb them, and may like to plant out some small rooted annuals on
the top of them later on, I should plant deep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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