The dishonesty of the majority of the modern builders of suburban “villa residences” is favorable to this and other similar radical household reforms, as thousands of these wretched tenements must sooner or later be pulled down, or will all come down together without any pulling the next time we experience one of those earthquake tremors which visit England about once in a century.
HOME GARDENS FOR SMOKY TOWNS.
The poetical philanthropists of the shepherd and shepherdess school, if any still remain, may find abundant material for their doleful denunciations of modern civilization on journeying among the house-tops by any of our over-ground metropolitan and suburban railways, and contemplating therefrom the panorama presented by a rapid succession of London back yards. The sandy Sahara, and the saline deserts of Central Asia, are bright and breezy, rural and cheerful, compared with these foul, soot-smeared, lumber-strewn areas of desolation.
The object of this paper is to propose a remedy for these metropolitan measle-spots, by converting them into gardens that shall afford both pleasure and profit to all concerned.
A very obvious mode of doing this would be to cover them with glass, and thus convert them into winter gardens or conservatories. The cost of this at once places it beyond practical reach; but even if the cost were disregarded, as it might be in some instances, such covering in would not be permissible on sanitary grounds; for, doleful and dreary as they are, the back yards of London perform one very important and necessary function; they act as ventilation-shafts between the house-backs of the more densely populated neighborhoods.
At one time I thought of proposing the establishment of horticultural home missions for promoting the dissemination of flower-pot shrubs in the metropolis, and of showing how much the atmosphere of London would be improved if every London family had one little sweetbriar bush, a lavender plant, or a hardy heliotrope to each of its members; so that a couple of million of such ozone generators should breathe their sweetness into the dank and dead atmosphere of the denser central regions of London.
A little practical experience of the difficulty of growing a clean cabbage, or maintaining alive any sort of shrub in the midst of our soot-drizzle, satisfied me that the mission would fail, even though the sweetbriars were given away by the district visitors; for these simple hardy plants perish in a mid-London atmosphere unless their leaves are periodically sponged and syringed, to wash away the soot particles that otherwise close their stomata and suffocate the plant.
It is this deposit that stunts or destroys all our London vegetation, with the exception of those trees which, like the planes have a deciduous bark and cuticle.
Some simple and inexpensive means of protecting vegetation from London soot are, therefore, most desirable.