188 THE FLORAL WORLD AND G-ARDEN GUIDE. 



purple. One of the mistakes here consists in the use of Tom Thumb nas- 

 turtium, which detracts most lamentably from the general high tone of 

 the planting. This is compensated for higher up by a better use of the 

 blue salvia than at Sydenham. It is trained down with heliotrope, and 

 edged with dwarf calceolaria, and though still open to objection if severely 

 criticised, is, nevertheless, too good to be found fault with. How the 

 commonest things may be turned to account, as means of reflecting light 

 on masses of colour, as well as giving neutral tones for relief, take note of 

 the circular beds planted with humeas in the centre, Prince's Feather round 

 them, and a bold edging of the common ribbou grass, or Gardeners'^Garters. 

 The variegated mint, another of the commonest of ribbon plants, is here 

 used with unequalled taste and judgment. The uses here indicated of the 

 pcrilla and chenopodium, with both of which it is so easy to do wrong, 

 and yet so easy to do right, suggest to us the necessity that exists, in spite 

 of the variety of bedders at our command, for other tints of crimson, 

 purple, and red, in foliage for bedding. Have you not, many a time, left 

 a few pots or pans of Love-lies-bleeding in an odd corner of a pit or frame, 

 after having planted out sufficient for the season ? Those pans were, per- 

 haps, crowded, with small plants in very sandy compost, and for fear a few 

 might be wanted, they were not destroyed, and, not being wanted, were 

 neglected. Starvation caused them to bloom at three or four inches high, 

 and the foliage and flower-spikes were then of one uniform crimson tint, 

 and as beautiful in their way as the best examples of furnishing plants in 

 the beds and borders. Just such plants as those starved amaranths are 

 what we want for ribbon lines and beds in places overshadowed with large 

 trees ; and on poor, hungry soil, in a hot season, Love-lies-bleeding would 

 probably make a second or third row of crimson foliage of the most effec- 

 tive character if properly contrasted. We have a similar class of colour- 

 ing in the deep coloured short top-beets that have hitherto been admitted 

 only to the kitchen-jflot ; but it would create a feeling of revulsion in most 

 horticultural minds if we were to propose the use of a highly coloured beet 

 for the third or fourth row of a ribbon, or for the centre of a circular bed, 

 with Golden Balm or Golden Chain geranium in front of it. Yet we have 

 seen one such example in a private garden this season, where a ribbon, 

 under the shade of trees, consisted of Golden Balm, Perilla, Golden Chain, 

 and crimson short-topped Beet, each in a line fifteen inches wide, making 

 a five-feet ribbon. We thought the chenopodium would have been better 

 than the beet, but the effect was, nevertheless, such as no horticultural 

 critic could dare to challenge roughly. But the range of subjects for 

 bedding enlarges rapidly. A vast number of our choicest stove plants 

 prove as adaptable to our out- door climate as did the Aucuba japonica 

 when it went from the stove to the greenhouse, and then to the open gar- 

 den, and so ceased for ever to be dealt with as an inmate of the hothouse. 

 All the new begonias, with their grandeur of form and their splendid tones 

 of bronze and silver and Tyrian dye, grow in the open air as thriftily as 

 burdocks, and keep over winter in cool houses as easily as geraniums, if 

 rather dry.. We may yet see Caladium Chantini in circular beds, won- 

 drous to behold ; Marantas on banks and rockeries, and a hundred other 

 things that are as yet carefully kept under glass or canvas all the summer 

 through, luxuriating in beds and borders, and the great specimen plants in 

 pots turned to account on terraced rockeries for the construction of extem- 

 pore tropical gardens. A semicircular bank of earth, made up in the 



