There is not a large garden at Speke, but just enough of simple groups of flowers to grace the beautiful timber front. The picture shows that the gardening is just right for the place; not asserting itself overmuch but doing its own part with a restful, quiet charm that has a right relation to the lovely old dwelling. GARDEN ROSES Those who follow the developments of taste in modern gardening, cannot fail to perceive how great has been the recent increase in the numbers of Roses that are for true beauty in the garden. It is only some of the elders among those who take a true and lively interest in their gardens who know what a scarcity of good things there was thirty years ago, or even twenty, compared with what we have now to choose from. Still, of the Roses commonly known as garden Roses, there were even then China Roses, Damask, Cabbage and Moss, Sweetbriars and Cinnamon Roses, and the free-growing Ayrshires, which are even now among the most indispensable. But the wave of indifferent taste in gardening that had flooded all England with the desire for summer bedding plants, to the almost entire exclusion of the worthier occupants of gardens, had for a time pushed aside the older garden Roses. For whereas in the earlier half of the nineteenth century these good old Roses were much planted and worthily used, with the coming of the fashion for the tender bedding plants they fell into general disuse; and, with the accompanying neglect of many a good hardy border plant, left our gardens very much the poorer, and, except for special spring bedding, bare of flowers for all the earlier part of the year. Now we have learnt the better ways, and have come to see that good gardening is based on something more stable and trustworthy than any passing freak of fashion. And though the foolish imp fashion will always pounce upon something to tease and worry over, and to set up on a temporary pedestal only to be pulled down again before long, so also it assails and would make its own for a time, some one or other point of garden practice. Just now it is the pergola and the Japanese garden; and truly wonderful are the absurdities committed in the name of both.