Instead of putting up masts and flags in towns, people might take down the advertisements, just for a day, to celebrate some great event. That might make the streets look nice. But if they really must put something up, they might as least choose something that would be less dismal than a show of flags on a wet day. They might try wreaths and flowers in enamelled iron. I have seen daffodils like that, highly recommended for back gardens in large towns, where real plants will not grow. The leaves look green and fresh all through the year, and you bring the flowers out whenever you please, as the iron stalks are hollow and fit on to long pins between the leaves. That kind of gardening tempts me. Such plants would never run wild or wither away or die, or do any of the other annoying things that real plants often do. I also find the automatic peacock very tempting. The real bird screeches, and gets up upon thatched roofs and digs itself in. But this is a stuffed bird with clock-work in it that puts its tail up for seven minutes every quarter-hour. No doubt, the topiary peacock is more restful to the eye; but it is slow of growth and needs much careful clipping. If box and yew are clipped into the shape of kerb-stones and stone walls, such trees may just as well be clipped into the shape of domes and pyramids and other architectural things; but not, I think, into the shape of birds and beasts that might fly off or walk away. It is only a bad joke to make a plant look like an animal, and even good jokes pall when they take twenty years to make and go on for a century. I like these things in other people’s gardens where I see them only now and then, but do not want them in my own where I should see them every day. In the Hall House garden I established two grass walks, crossing one another at right-angles, with hedges ten feet high and four feet thick made of clipped cypress and looking as solid as walls. I not only like the look of them, but find them very convenient--in one or other of those walks I can always be out of the sun or out of the wind, if either is too strong. The cypress is Cupressus Macrocarpa, which grows very quickly here; and if anybody wants to make a hedge of it, I should advise him to keep his hedge a little narrower at the top than at the base. With a very slight slope of the sides the rain runs down to the lowest twigs; but if the sides are bolt upright, the lowest twigs dry up and wither away, leaving an ugly hollow underneath.