LILLIPUTIAN PARKS

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 18, 21 July 1934, Page 7

LILLIPUTIAN PARKS

MINIATURE ESTATES

ARRIVAL OF DISH GARDENS

Broad acres, winding drives, running streams, wide parks, ample flower beds, lawns and ponds, and summer houses to x'osscss arc a dream of all but are beyond reach of most. Yet if one chooses to -be a Lilliputian, one can have them all, and still live in the city 'midst all the noise and jangle, have them upon the drawing-room table, bookcase, or the window-sill of the narrow flat. ■ Cross-word squares and jig-saw puzzles are on the wane. Fashions are changing. Vases always have been crammed with flowers alive or dead, fragrant and dank, or crisp and dry like the everlasting daisies. In the good old Victorian days most houses possessed a spray of coral or posies tied with silver spangles and pretty ribands. Today the trend and the fancy are to wander through the' Botanical Gardens and the public parks as often as commercial ties permit, and to. own for one's self an estate, not of broad acres, but of miniatures, not of dead trees but of live ones. In a word—dish garden estates have "arrived" in New Zealand.

Within-, the confines of a dish or earthenware tray as large'as the office blotting pad you may construct your estate at your leisure, plant your lawns, dig and fill your lakes, make skyreflecting rivers run, waterfalls sparkle, eroato a copsn of trees, hedges of smaller ones, pave the paths. You may in fancy cross your rustic bridges and linger in your summer houses—in fancy, though you never stir from the settee of the city flat. "Ever let the fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home." NEW ZEALAND EXAMPLE. One keen Wellington woman spent Easter time at Tongariro National Park and wandered at large, but not in vain. She gathered carpets and lawns of moss, sedges of lichen, forests of Lilliputian trees—giant-like, with all the attributes of birds'nests and branches if peered unon ous of one. eye—-and very miniature vegetable life as varied and interesting in design of stem and foliage as it was in colour and appeal. That woman is not likely to forget Tongariro. She craved for a.park and, as the shops arid streets and flats are narrow and dingy, she, planned an estate, made it real and, whenever the mood fits and fancy takes her, lives in it-

New Zealand possesses, as wide a range of flora as it is possible to conceive. Who would have suspected that the forest floor gave road to "trees" which never grow beyond three or four inches. except' in many years and yet which, like. lion cubs, look just like the fully-grown adults? Summer houses and bridges and.ornaments of Japanese atmosphere this amateur landscape gardener used in her first- creation, but so effective and so lasting has the garden been that she has decided to lay out a bigger estate using Maori palisades and raupo whares to obtain a New Zealand atmosphere.

Cement and sand can be used for hills, hollows, margins, and foundations for rustic bridges and Rummer houses; sand and pebble's for pathways; mirrors for lakes and . rivers; leaf mould for the roots of the miniature plants. Garden ornaments are on the market in miniature.

In America and Japan the fashion is in full swing and it was. doubtless from these quarters that it has spread to New 'Zealand.