Bacon speaks of a “heath or desert” as a part of the garden, and says it is “to be framed as much as may be to a natural wilderness.” There are to be no trees there, but thickets of honeysuckle and other trailing plants, and heaps like molehills, set with pinks or periwinkles, or violets, or various “sweet and sightly” flowers, and on some of the heaps little bushes of juniper or rosemary, or other low-growing shrubs, are to be planted. Such a garden would hardly seem to be one of “natural wildness”; but Bacon’s theory that there should be a “wild garden” is, with certain modifications, carried out in various places. But to _cultivate_ a wild garden almost involves a paradox. The plants should grow of their own accord, and as their vagrant fancy takes them. The prettiest of all wild gardens is when the bluebells are so thick that they seem a reflection of the sky, or the celandine lies in sunny patches on a bank, or the primrose and violet come up here and there at the foot of old forest-trees. Sometimes, too, less common flowers, which have been planted years ago, and have spread as it has pleased them, give an effect of even greater beauty. We remember one large shrubbery all blue with hepaticas, and another golden with the winter aconite. Other plants, such as the anchusa or the _Petasites fragrans_, may be trusted to take care of themselves, and are well worth some half-wild corner. On the other hand, it is not well to attempt to grow native plants when the conditions of their new life would be unfavourable. It is almost sad to see some bee-orchis, or grass of Parnassus, or mountain auricula, or other rare British plant, transplanted into a shrubbery border. It is far better to leave these “wildings of nature,” as Campbell calls them, in their native haunts, and to experience for oneself a new pleasure in finding them growing wild and vigorous on down, or bog, or hilly slope. Occasionally a garden flower which has sprung up from some stray seed will add a certain unexpected charm to a walk or grass plot. Such flowers are in a sense weeds no doubt, but “weeds of glorious feature,” and there are few who, like Lady Byron—and the story is characteristic—would at once order the gardener to uproot them. One beautiful form of semi-wild garden is where, on some piece of rich peat soil, rhododendrons have been thickly planted. There is a fine example of this at Knowsley, where thousands of large shrubs are growing in the greatest luxuriance, and where, as the slight irregularity of the ground permits, you pass between banks and slopes and hollows, quite purple with the clustered blossoms.