For most readers of THE GIRL’S OWN PAPER certain parts of the book have less value than others. Much of it is taken up with the gardens of the wealthy. Miss Jekyll’s own garden, which furnishes the backbone of the book, entails considerable expenditure, and is the ideal garden for a moderate-sized manor-house. But she treats her garden as a cottage garden is treated. She buys every plant herself, and puts it into the ground with her own hands, and she keeps her eye on every plant as if it were a child, doctoring it when it is weakly, and removing it when it is obviously unsuited to thrive under those conditions. She pays special attention to the cottage gardens in her neighbourhood, knowing that in them she will get her best object lessons in the survival of the fittest. A cottage wife, to be successful with her garden, has to use the flowers which experience shows will do best in the neighbourhood. Her space is limited; she cannot afford expensive protection against weather, or expensive manures; she cannot afford to renew her plants often. By paying special attention to the gardens of her poor neighbours, Miss Jekyll has secured some of the most luxuriant massings of blossom in her own. Invaluable advice will be found in the book upon such ordinary subjects as flower-borders, villa gardens, and small town gardens, and Miss Jekyll complements her generalisations on the subject by descriptions of actual gardens of exceptional success and beauty. But I prefer to take for my example of her book something a little more out of the ordinary, which yet is within the reach of families of limited means—the formation of a pergola, especially since it is quite possible to make a pergola in the narrow strip of garden with which Londoners have to be content. What is a pergola? people will ask. Webster, in his great dictionary, defines it thus: “Pergola, _n._ (It.), Pergula, _n._ (Lat.) (ancient architecture), a sort of gallery or balcony in a house. Some suppose it to be an arbour in a garden or a terrace overhanging one.” Webster, severe New Englander, had not before his mind the kind of pergola which haunts the memory of the lover of Italy when he is back in prosaic London. To such, a pergola is part not of a house, but of a garden, the framework for an avenue-arbour covered usually with vines, but occasionally with gourds. This framework consists of a long colonnade of snow-white plaster columns which support the cross-rafters over which the vines are trained. And the prettiest ones are those which crown overhanging terraces. For pergolas a single row of columns and a wall are perhaps better suited to our more tempestuous climate. The Italians prefer a double row of columns. Nearly every monastery in the South of Italy has its pergola, as, for example, the often-pictured convent of the Cappuccini at Amalfi. In the winter, when their leaves are off, these pergolas give the effect of a peristyle in Pompeii. Here is Miss Jekyll’s recipe for a pergola.