CHAP. XII VILLA GAKDENI^TT 71 



well adapted for clothing walls and pillars ; Vivid, Catherine Bell, 

 Princess Louisa Victoria, Selina (an American Rose), Fulgens, and 

 ]\Iadame Plantier, are the cream of them. The Japanese have 

 their Roses, though it is only within the last few years that they 

 have been brought into notice. Paquerette, Mignonette, and Perle 

 d'Or are very pretty dwarf cluster Roses from Japan ; and Simplex, 

 a new single Rose from the same interesting country, will probably 

 be sought after by those wlio are smitten by the growing taste for 

 single flowers. Then in tlie Rugosa section we have a class of 

 very handsome single Roses, which everybody should grow, for 

 both flowers and foliage are exceedingly chaste and beautiful, and 

 after the flowers come the fruit, which is no mean ornament. 

 There is yet one more little Rose I should like to notice, and that 

 is the Alpine Rose, Rosa pyrenaica, also a single-flowered kind ; it 

 should be planted on the rockery and allowed to spread. The 

 fruits, which are large in proportion to the other parts of the plant, 

 are very bright and showy. 



CHAPTER XII 



BEDS OF SUMMER AND AUTUMN FLOWERS 



The bedding system, as it was understood and carried out fifteen 

 or twenty years ago, is being gradually refined away, and it is 

 never likely again, at least in our day, to obtain the hold over 

 people's minds it once possessed ; and those who have shaken them- 

 selves free from its toils are wondering what they could have seen 

 in it to make so much fuss about, though it may linger in a limited 

 degree in large places and public gardens and parks, where the 

 object is to catch the public eye, for sometime longer ; and in 

 point of fact, in our gloomy, often foggy climate, I do not see what 

 there is to object to in a mass of warm-coloured flowers anywhere, 

 if moderation be observed. What so disgusted thinking people 

 was the outrageous manner in which beds of Pelargoniums and 

 Calceolaris, and similar things, were stuck about in every vacant 

 spot, to the exclusion of better things. If the bedding system had 

 been confined within the limits it had risen to, say thirty-five or 

 forty years ago, in well-managed gardens, there w<-iuld have been 

 little to complain of. It was the craze that afterwards set in 

 which led to the rooting up of so many good old things, and 

 produced the present strong reactionary wave. People, otherwise 

 sensible, seemed to have run wild upon this idea of bedding out. 

 Only a dozen years ago little bits of variegated Geraniums that 



