My Garden*

Abstract

WITHIN about twelve miles of London Bridge as the crow flies, at Beddington, in Surrey, Mr. Smee has a garden, and the description and history of this garden are the subject of as pretty and entertaining a book as we have met with for a long time. In thus describing the book, we advisedly use terms which do not imply that it has any great scientific value in the sense of being the medium of publication of new facts; nor, indeed, does it put forward any such pretensions. Mr. Smee, whose reputation as an original investigator in electrical science, and as the inventor of the galvanic battery which bears bounded on one side by an artificial lake, and watered by the river Wandle. When first brought into cultivation the land was a peat-morass; but is now made to produce every variety of scenery that ornamental gardening can display. Here we have umbrageous forest-trees, and here a rustic bridge; here a fern-glen, and here a nightingale bower; here a rockery of Alpine plants, and here a glimpse of beautiful water scenery. Indeed, in looking at the exquisite drawings with which the book is embellished, his name, is thirty years old, is in the domain of natural history essentially an amateur, and the work which he now publishes is an amateur's book. To rank it in the same class as Gilbert White's “Natural History of Sel-borne” is very high praise, but in some respects it certainly deserves it. Faults the book undoubtedly has; some would call it egotistic, but it is a kindly sort of egotism, which interests the reader in the author and everything connected with him; and here and there the critical reader will detect a slip betraying want of accurate scientific knowledge; but these are very few compared with the amount of information contained in its pages.