HOCK GARDEN.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14274, 15 August 1910, Page 2

HOCK GARDEN.

In. these days when rock-gardens — Japanese or otherwise —are the vogue, it is well that London should be proud of the one rock-garden that it possesses in its very heart, namely, that Aldwych "wilderness," which has been the cynosure of -'bus-top botanists for live years and more.

Each summer has brought its ever-i-ncreasing list of the wild flowers thatbirds and breezes have sown upon and prospered. Something like fifty really distinct and recognisable wild flowers go to form the Aldwych. nusegay — apart from the grasses and mosses.

Even now one might gather there big bunches of campion, buttercups, seladine, potentilla, clover, oxeye daisies, ragwort, and yarrow m flower at this moment between Kjngsway and the Strand, not to mention dandelions, thistles, hedge-parsley, chick-weed, phiintaiu, dock and other less precious colonists. Here aud there young apple and cherry trees —products of the casual pip—have already established themselves. But it is the way in which Nature is beginning to turn these rubbishheaps into quite a serious rock-garden of its own from the landscape point of view that is really more marvellous than any botanic "discoveries. Little by little the piles of brickbats are being draped with moss and stonecrop, and the rusty pans screened with leaves. The odd chunks of larger masonry, now beginninn to grow grey with age. are becoming actually picturesque as'they peep through little shrubberies anil lakes of verdure. Indeed, in the heat of the sun, one could he in one of the chance hollows right m the middle of the Aldwvch "wilderness," and there, with the bracken waving close at hand, and butterflies flitting hither and thither, and a light breeze fanning one's cheek, one could forget that one was in Loudon at all. So Nature herself is teaching the London gardeners what can be done with a. few acres of land and cartloads of broken brick, if only they will leave them to themselves for a dozen vears or so. Why should not the experiment be tried in real earnest somewhere? One knows of many a, grim, formal little open space in London, with straight uninteresting paths and cast-iron seats set at intervals, that would be a thousand times more refreshing for a touch of hill and dale, and a good wnist-hhdi crop of Aldwych weeds and wildflower*