Our beau-ideal of what ought to be is this. Every plant planted in the bed of soil taking its natural shape, and only gently cut in when it began to interfere with the others, or to occupy a greater horizontal space at the top than it does at its base, because this would deprive the sides of the plant of sufficient vertical light. The climbers trained up the rafters; and the evergreens such as camellias, and other winter-flowering plants such as acacias, trained against the back wall. The former we would allow to hang down in festoons, and the latter we would at first train in till they covered the wall, and afterwards allow the laterals produced by the secondary branches to protrude themselves in a natural manner, as they do in the conservatory at Redleaf, and at various other places. This picture refers to conservatories where all the plants are grown in the free soil. Where only the climbers are grown in the free soil, and all the other plants in pots or boxes, as at Ashridge and Bromley Hill, we would endeavour, unless it could not be done without offering great violence to the plant, to give each individual plant a regular form.
