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I like warm color also on the walks. I should always have red walks if I could afford them. There is a red material, the result of some process of burning, which we used to get in the iron and coal districts of Yorkshire, which I used to think very pretty, but I do not know what it is called.

Good walks are a great luxury. It is a wise economy to go round your walks after rain and look for little puddles; make a note of where the water lodges and fill it up. Keep gratings swept. If the grating is free and there is an overflow not to be accounted for, it is very possible that a drain-pipe somewhere is choke-full of the roots of some tree.

Some people advise hacking up your walks from time to time, and other people advise you not. Some people say there is nothing like salt to destroy walk weeds and moss, and brighten the gravel, and some people say that salt in the long run feeds the ground and the weeds. I am disposed to think that, in a Little Garden, there is nothing like a weeding woman with an old knife and a little salt afterwards. It is also advisable to be your own weeding woman, that you may be sure that the weeds come up by the roots! Next to the cast-iron back before mentioned, I recommend a housemaid’s kneeling mat (such as is used for scrubbing floors), as a gardener’s comfort.

I hope, if you have been bulb planting, that you got them all in by Lord Mayor’s Day. Whether bulbs should be planted deep or shallow is another “vexed question.” In a Little Garden, where you don’t want to disturb them, and may like to plant out some small rooted annuals on the top of them later on, I should plant deep.

If you are planting roses, remember that two or three, carefully planted in good stuff that goes deep, will pay you better than six times the number stuck into a hole in cold clay or sand or builders’ rubbish, and left to push their rootlets as best they can, or perish in the attempt. Spread out these rootlets very tenderly when planting. You will reap the reward of your gentleness in flowers. Rose roots don’t like being squeezed, like a Chinese lady’s feet. I was taught this by one who knows,–He has a good name for the briar suckers and sprouts which I hope you carefully cut off from your grafted roses,–He calls it “the old Adam!”

Yours, etc.

LETTER III.

A good rule
Is a good tool.

DEAR LITTLE FRIEND,

January is not a month in which you are likely to be doing much in your little garden. Possibly a wet blanket of snow lies thick and white over all its hopes and anxieties. No doubt you made all tidy, and some things warm, for the winter, in the delicious opportunities of S. Luke’s and S. Martin’s little summers, and, like the amusing American I told you of, “turned away writing resurgam on the gate-post.”

I write resurgam on labels, and put them wherever bulbs lie buried, or such herbaceous treasures as die down, and are, in consequence, too often treated as mere mortal remains of the departed, by the undiscriminating hand of the jobbing gardener.

Winter is a good time to make plans, and to put them down in your Garden-book. Have you a Garden-book? A note-book, I mean, devoted to garden memoranda. It is a very useful kind of commonplace book, and soon becomes as fascinating as autumn and spring catalogues.

One has to learn to manage even a Little Garden chiefly by experience, which is slow teaching, if sure. Books and gardeners are helpful; but, like other doctors, they differ. I think one is often slower to learn anything than one need be, from not making at once for first principles. If one knew more of these, it would be easier to apply one’s own experience, and to decide amid conflicting advice.