330 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
charm which always attaches to an “old-fashioned garden,” with its 
exuberant tangle of form and color. Every yard has some such 
strip of land along a rear walk or fence or against a building. Itis 
the easiest thing to plant it,—ever so much easier than digging the 
hideous geranium bed into the center of an inoffensive lawn. 
There is no prescribed rule as to what you should put into these 
flower-borders. Put in them the plants you like. Perhaps, the 
greater part of them should be perennials, which come up of them- 
selves every spring,and which are hardy andreliable. Wildflowers 
are particularly effective. Every one knows that many of the native 
herbs of woods and glades are more attractive than some of the most 
prized garden flowers. The greater part of these native flowers grow 
readily under cultivation, some even in places which, in soil and ex- 
posure, are much unlike their native haunts. Many of them make 
thickened roots, and they may be safely trrnsplanted at any time 
after the flowers have passed. To most persons, the wild flowers are 
less known that many exotics which have smaller merit, and the ex- 
tension of cultivation is constantly tending to annihilate them. 
Here, then, in the informal flower-border, is an opportunity to rescue 
them. Then one may sow in freely of easy-growing annuals,as 
marigolds, China asters, petunias and phloxes, and the like. One 
of the advantages of these borders is that they are always ready to 
receive more plants, unless they are full; thatis, their symmetry is 
not marred if some plants are pulled out and others are put in, 
and if the weeds now and then get a start, very little harm is done. 
Such a border half full of weeds is handsomer than the average 
wellkept geranium bed, because the weeds enjoy growing and the 
geraniums do not. I have such a border, three feet wide and ninety 
feet long beside a rear walk. I am putting plants into it every 
month in the year when the frost is out of the ground. Plants are 
dug in the woods or fields, whenever I find one which I fancy, even 
it in July. The tops are cut off, the roots kept moist, and, even 
though the soil is a most unkindly one, most of these much abused 
plants grow. Such a border has something new and interesting 
every month of the growing season; and even in the winter the tall 
clumps of grasses and aster-stems wave their plumes above the 
snow and are asource of delight to every frolicsome bevy of snow- 
birds. 
A NEw GRAPE TRELLIS.—Mr. T. V. Munson, a most successful and 
progressive grape grower of Texas, has devised a sort of trellis 
which is highly commended by those who have tried it. It consists 
of posts, set at suitable distances apart in the row of vines, stand- 
ing five and a half feet high from the surface of the ground. To 
the top is nailed a crosspiece of 1x6 stuff,two feetlong. Along each 
end of these crosspieces a wire is run so that the trellis has two top 
wires two feet apart. Eight inches below them a single wire is run, 
which is fastened directly to the posts. In using this trellis, a 
strong cane is brought up to this lower wire and the top pinched 
off and two branches trained to run along the wire, one each way. 
Then when the bearing branches appear, next season, they are 
carried out at the sides and hung over the top wires. Thus the fruit 
hangs down in easy reach for spraying and picking, yet is, at the 
same time,in the shade of the foilage of the vine. The bearing 
wood is renewed each year by two new side shoots brought out 
from the top by the upright cane. 
