ences are always a moot question to the gardener, for if she has a
pleasant neighbour, she does not like to raise an aggressive barrier or
perhaps cut off the view, yet to a certain extent I like being walled in
at least on two sides. A total lack of boundaries is too
impersonal,--the eye travels on and on: there is nothing to rest it by
comparison. Also, where there are no fences or hedges,--and what are
hedges but living fences,--there is nothing to break the ground draught
in winter and early springtime. The ocean is much more beautiful and
full of meaning when brought in contact with a slender bit of coast. The
moon has far more majesty when but distancing the tree-tops than when
rolling apparently at random through an empty sky. A vast estate may
well boast of wide sweeps and open places, but the same effect is not
gained, present fashion to the contrary, by throwing down the barriers
between a dozen homes occupying only half as many acres. Preferable is
the cosey English walled villa of the middle class, even though it be a
bit stuffy and suggestive of earwigs. The question should not be to
fence or not to fence, but rather _how_ to fence usefully and
artistically, and any one who has an old stone wall, such as you have,
moss grown and tumble-down, with the beginnings of wildness already
achieved, has no excuse for failure. We have seen other fences here
where bushes, wire, and vines all take part, but they cannot compete
with an old wall.

With ferns, a topic opens as long and broad and deep as the glen below
us, and of almost as uncertain climbing, for it is not so much what
ferns may be dug up and, as individual plants, continue to grow in new
surroundings, but how much of their haunt may be transplanted with them,
that the fern may keep its characteristics. Many people do not think of
this, nor would they care if reminded. Water lilies, floating among
their pads in the still margin of a stream, with jewelled dragon-flies
darting over, soft clouds above and the odour of wild grapes or swamp
azalea wafting from the banks, are no more to them than half a dozen
such lilies grown in a sunken tub or whitewashed basin in a backyard;
rather are they less desirable because less easily controlled and
encompassed. Such people, and they are not a few, belong to the tribe of
Peter Bell, who saw nothing more in the primrose by the river's brim
than that it was a primrose, and consequently yellow. Doubtless it would
have loo