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Home and Garden; Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Worker in Both
Home and Garden Notes and Thoughts Practical and Critical of a Worker in Both Author:Gertrude Jekyll General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1901 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green Subjects: Gardening Gardeners Architecture / Landscape Gardening / General Gardening / Flowers / General Gardening / Garden Design Gardening / Landscape Gardening / Regional / General Gardening / Techniques Notes: ... more »This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III A GARDEN OF WALL-FLOWERS I AM never tired of watching and observing how plants will manage not only to exist but even to thrive in difficult circumstances. For this sort of observation my very poor sandy soil affords me only too many opportunities. Now, on a rather cold afternoon in April, I go to a sheltered part of the garden, and almost at random place my seat opposite a sloping bank thinly covered with Periwinkles. The bank is the northern flank of a mound of sand, thinly surfaced when it was made with some poor earth from a hedge- bank that was being removed. This place was purposely chosen for the Periwinkles, in order to check their growth and restrain them from running together into a tight mat of runners, as they do so quickly if they are planted in better soil. This poverty of soil and the summer dryness of their place keeps them very much at home, and they make stout, well-flowered tufts, with only a few weak runners. There is something among them on the ground looking like bright crimson flower-buds, about an inch long. I look nearer and see that they are acorns, fallen last autumn from a tree that overhangs this end of thebank. The acorns have thrown off their outer shells, and the inner skin, of a pale greenish-yellow colour when first uncased, has turned, first to pale pink and then to a strong crimson. The first root has been...« less