identical. Lovelier than either, Clusiana, that vision of a tulip, its snow-white petals bestriped with vividest rose, and an indescribable grace of deportment for which alone among its sturdy, rather thick-set race it has preserved the secret.

But space fails to tell of half the population of that miraculous little bit of copse. Yet I must find room for one more plant, namely, cyclamen, two species of which were here, not indeed in flower, but carpeting the whole ground with their veined leaves, objects so beautiful that it seems unreasonable to expect them to produce anything further. A cyclamen-carpet, by the way, is a piece of woodland furniture which may be perfectly reproduced in any home copse, so long as bracken and a few of our ruder natives are kept in abeyance, cyclamen being among the few non-native plants for which the word naturalisation is not, in my experience, a mere snare and misnomer.

All this by way of prelude! It seems, in fact, a remarkably lopsided way of writing about Florentine gardens to devote the greater part of one's space to what lies outside their walls. The truth, however, is, though one admits it reluctantly, that, whereas all the wilder regions around Florence are as nearly perfect as it is in the nature of things to be, the deliberately laid-out flower gardens of its villas leave often much to be desired by the devout flower-lover.

Even coming straight from our own poor frost-bitten flower-beds at home, it is something of a shock to find oneself in a garden of which all that one can say is that, setting aside such permanent things as myrtles, magnolias, and oleanders, and setting aside the happily indestructible violet, its most attractive inmates are the flowering weeds which have strayed in sporadically over the walls, and are liable, I imagine, to be summarily ejected whenever the gardener has time to attend to them.

In the majority of cases-in all, in fact, which have not been the objects of a specially watchful love and attention-the besetting sin of these gardens is their excessive dryness. They are more than dry; many of them are positively dusty. To a sympathetic eye nothing can be more tragic than the condition of these desiccated stocks, these dust-laden geraniums, these shrivelled and flowerless daisy bushes, growing daily more dried up and unattractive-looking, as the sun and cold wind alternately or simultaneously beat and batter them out of every shadow of comeliness.

And the provoking thing is that there is not the slightest occasion for anything of the sort! These drought-stricken creatures are for the most part growing, or rather perishing, within the easiest reach of some tank or basin, without which no Italian garden ever did or could exist. The friendly aid of a watering-pot, or, where attainable, of the still more acceptable and beneficent garden hose, is all that is needed to turn this wilderness of sticks and brown earth into

A little forethought, a little

a paradise of greenery and colour. knowledge of what will and will not flower during those first spring months, are of course needed also; above all, some little experience of what will and what will not stand the flail of those detestable winds which too often make Florentine springs a mere weariness of the flesh to others besides the irascible gardener.

One very important point, I feel sure, in all southern gardens is a steady pursuance of that periodic transfer from sun to shade, and back to sun again; a process which even in England, at least in its drier regions, all who love their gardens are beginning to realise to be indispensable if they do not wish to see the living delights of spring turned into the shrivelled sun-stricken corpses of June and July.

In South France and throughout the whole of Italy the process, I take it, has to be much more radical. I asked a local gardener what he did with his daffodils and jonquils in summer, telling him that our method was to dig them up and lay them in the sunshine to ripen. He laughed loud and long over the notion, informing us that theirs were dug up indeed, but stored in the darkest and coolest cellar that could be found, if you did not want them to be not dried merely, but cooked!

The interminable array of flower-pots, big and little, ornamental or the reverse, which forms such a feature of all southern gardens points to the same necessity. Naturally, for the Italian villa-owner the chief interest is that the garden should look its best in summer, when alone, as a rule, he is in it. Real summer gardening, as we understand the word, is almost non-existent in Italy—indeed, is said to be an impossibility, though I cannot help feeling a certain amount of scepticism on that head. Of annuals alone there are enough, surely, which delight in heat to produce the most gorgeous results? Take the little portulaca, if something low-growing is wanted; a being which revels in the roasting suns of India, and at home can never find weather hot enough to suit it. Why should not every Italian border be illuminated with its gay little lamps of scarlet and yellow, of white and of orange? Poppies, again? Picture the sumptuous effects of multitudes of great opium poppies lolling somnolent heads in some dusky corner, overlooked by rows of stone river gods, whose urns now and then let fall that mere trickle or sprinkle which is all such vegetable salamanders really require ?

For most of us this, however, is a matter of merely academic interest, and if we were on the spot it is probable that the thought of poppies would merely suggest one more snooze in our hammocks, out of which we should be disinclined to stir even on behalf of such mild horticultural operations as these.

For Florence undoubtedly can be desperately hot.

Across a gulf

of years memory still conjures up the recollection of certain July days, and still more of certain July nights, spent upon the banks of the Arno. Returning from a belated stay in the Amalfi and Capri region, we lingered-I cannot now remember why-for some days at Florence on our way north. The oily Dead-Sea gleam of the river below our windows, scarce perceptible between its sun-bleached stones, glimmers before me yet. Still more vivid is the remembrance of the usually rather unsuggestive Boboli gardens, seen under the light of a particularly sultry afternoon.

I had strayed in there to escape the intolerable streets, and had found it practically empty. The blackness of its interminable colonnades of cypress and ilex, the spectral whiteness of the space beyond, are still curiously present. I remember the thrill with which I stood expecting something or some one-I knew not what -to come stalking towards me across that shadeless expanse. For it is one of the odd effects of great heat, at least in my experience, that it seems to loosen one's ordinary hold over what we call the actual, and to throw the reins up on the neck of a wilder, freer creature than our everyday selves—a creature with odd intuitions, and an almost absolute detachment from the probable. The hedge between the real and the unreal seems to get temporarily broken down, and all sorts of mysterious, yet not unfamiliar, figures to come stalking in upon one over the ruins.

This, however, is again trifling! We are not now in July, but in March, and are trying to address ourselves to the problem of how best to outwit its pernicious winds, and to make a garden smiling and gay in spite of them. Dogmatism is offensive, especially from the partially informed, yet it seems clear to me that the whole business tends to compress itself into the two familiar words, Shelter and Water. Of sun there is enough, even during the dullest months, while frost rarely penetrates beyond an inch or two below the surface. Planting and watering alone will not, however, suffice at Florence, as they suffice at Cannes, Mentone, Bordighera, Algiers-indeed along the whole of that, horticulturally speaking, happy-go-lucky edge of the Mediterranean. To insure such a result the plants must be not alone planted, not alone even planted and watered: they must be watched, cared for, sheltered, coaxed, petted, helped on in every way; they must be treated, in short, as we treat, or ought to treat, them at home, with a proper motherly regard for the separate needs and separate perils of every separate individual.

It can be done, however, in Florence, whereas it cannot be done with us; and that is the whole gist of the present contention. From the little I have seen of its gardens, backed by a certain amount of experience where the conditions were not so dissimilar, I feel sure that it only needs a moderate expenditure of care, thought, and money-the last nowhere an unimportant garden requisite-to

cause the surroundings of every Florentine villa to bloom and burgeon from mid-January till late spring.

Even with us there are far more plants than most people imagine which would flower, and moreover wish to flower, quite early in the year. Apart from snowdrops and crocuses, from aconites and Christmas roses; apart from hepaticas, early primroses, polyanthuses, wallflowers, arabis, and so on, there are no fewer than five species of iris-Alata, Stylosa, Reticulata, Histrio, and Histrioides -ready to spring into masses of bloom then, and doing so, moreover, in sheltered corners when they get the chance. As for the bulbs, their name is legion, including all the early daffodils, as well as quite a host of very early blooming perennials, such as gentians, alyssums, ranunculus, geums, myosotis, dwarf phloxes, corydalis, aubrietias, daphnes, &c.; enough, in short, to make a garden as gay as any one need wish to see it, only that with us the position is too strained. The effort cannot long be kept up. The delusive gleams of sunshine fade and vanish away. In spite of science, in spite of love, in spite of everything that can be tried, the North remains the North. Sooner or later the frost-fiend puts out his full strength, and then the battle is over.

And now, by way of proving how near the vision of perfection certain Florentine gardens already are, as well as by way of amends for so much impertinence, let me describe two gardens which, now that I am no longer under Tuscan skies, or likely speedily to be under them again, remain a floating legacy, 'sheer lifted o'er the gulf' of a terribly fugitive memory.

Both are gardens upon that north-facing side which is said by the dwellers on the slopes of Fiesole to be at least three weeks later than their own. The precise difference must be left to the experts, but that it is later is certain, the common white iris, for instance, being well in flower along most of the roads below Fiesole before a single bud is clear of its green sheath in the Arcetri region.

Yet it was a garden upon this less well-favoured slope which more than any other realised for me that ideal toward which my mind since my arrival had been dimly groping. Facing it, you have before you three terraces. The first is paved to begin with, but merges into level grass, and ends in a narrow border, where pale pink and deep red Pyrus japonica are in flower. The second is attained by a steep flight of stone steps. Here a space is shut in on three sides by walls topped with vases at intervals, the spaces between the vases running to meet one another in a succession of stony scrolls. Further on is an archway, with a gate, and more steps leading into a grassy vineyard. Two of these walls have been pierced with windowlike spaces, and below one of them runs a steep hill road, so that the creaking of wheels, the shrilling of voices, the

VOL. XLV-No. 264

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whole stir and life of suburban Florence, come floating in upon us as we sit or saunter among the flower-beds.

These are enclosed in solid green frames of box, four large and two small ones, on each side of a central walk. Not an inch of bare earth is to be seen, though we are still only at St. Patrick's Day. For groundwork we have the friendly, indispensable myosotis, I suppose dissitiflora, out of which familiar blue cloud rises a host of other things: Anemone fulgens, in all its splendour; aquilegias, jonquils, primroses of a dozen different kinds; more anemones, blue, white, or red; dwarf magnolias; more Pyrus japonica, alias cydonia; daphnes of at least three species—a longer list, in fact, than I have breath to enumerate or you patience to follow; a tip-toeing crowd of Spring's courtiers, thronging the heels of their liege lady, sunning themselves in her smile, responsive to her slightest beck, and moderately secure here from those shrewd nips with which, like Elizabeth of illustrious memory, she is apt to honour those who press too vigorously forward in her service.

My second garden is distinctly inferior to this one from a horticultural point of view, but then the ground rises and falls delightfully: all sorts of enchanting things seem to be flowering there of their own accord, and above and beyond everything else that great stone and marble flower, Florence itself, rises resplendent, taking and keeping the eye from the first moment of entering it.

It was perhaps the staircase of that garden, rather than the garden itself, which so especially enchained me. It was a staircase in two divisions, each division consisting of some forty or more steps, each step consisting of a solid slab of rock barely two hands' breadth across, but clamped, as solidly as a mussel or a limpet is clamped, to a great cliff-like stone wall, which sank perpendicularly downward until, fifty feet below, it sank into an abyss of grass and feathery fennel.

It must have been a very old staircase, for time and neglect had laid layers of moss and lichen between every step and ledge; indeed the lintel of a doorway hard by bore the date 1597. Above it cypresses towered like gigantic ninepins. On one side the wall was roofed by a tangle of ilex and olives, so closely welded together that no ray of sunlight can, in all the years it has existed, have laid more than a transitory finger there. On the other side clearer spaces broke at intervals, and through these spaces, between the trunks of the trees, floated all Florence, set in its circumference of violet hills, and barred by every accident of sun and shade.

To stand upon the steps of that staircase is, as it were, to hold the whole town in the hollow of one's hand; to be able to play with it, and to make a magic toy-box of it and its contents. Here between two diverging or converging branches you may see the Duomo in all its swelling symmetry, Giotto's campanile rising beside it as