We have had a most unusually hot dry summer, and to go into the garden is absolute pain to me, for all the trouble and labour of the year seem more or less wasted. Plants are miserably forced into bloom, to go off almost immediately; and it is little consolation to know a week's rain will make many plants beautiful again, for the especial beauty of early summer is over. July and August are always trying months here. The soil is so very light, and one must pay the penalty; even the heavy soils, I am told, are suffering much this year.

One ought, too, to study with great interest and take note of what survives, and even does better in these very dry years. That handsome, rather coarse-growing perennial, Buphthalmum cordifolium, now called Telehia speciosa-as if one such name were not enough for a stout-growing composite-looked shrivelled and unhappy last month, but it has flowered better than usual, and it is a handsome plant. The pretty feathery Gypsophila paniculata never suffers from dryness, it has such a splendid big tap-root. The Gaillardias, moved from the seed bed in spring, have done very well in full sun.

The Coreopsis grandiflora blazes in the sunlight. I save a little seed from the largest flowers of both of these, and sow them every year, so as to have a continual supply of young plants. It is not to avoid buying fresh seeds that I mark the best flowers of some, but because by this means, and by saving only from the best flowers, I get really better plants.

My Carnations are much less good than usual this year, but I cannot blame the weather for this. I stupidly followed the advice in some of the gardening papers last year of leaving the layers on the old plants till April. I shall never do so again; here it does not answer at all; but I shall layer them as early as possible, take them off in October, and make up the bed then. It is a very good plan to plant a row of young Carnation plants in the kitchen garden, some distance apart, so that they may be layered earlier than in the beds.