THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



The Scottish way of going half a mile to the kitchen garden to find 

 the flower garden there, is not the best. There is no reason why 

 there should not be mixed borders in the kitchen garden, but the real 

 flower garden, varied and beautiful as it ought to be, should be within 

 easy access of the sitting-rooms. In all artistic things formulas are 

 dangerous, and the best way is to study the site, and, in a wide 

 sense, the more varied the better, even as regards position. Always 

 the south and warm sides of the house should be taken advantage of, 

 and the cold side reserved for the entrance, and usually it should be 

 cut off from the warmer, or garden, sides. 



Sometimes the discovery of a vein of fine soil away from the 

 house may justify the making of a garden there, in the same way as 

 the late Sir Henry Yorke made a wood garden in Buckinghamshire. 

 Having found a fine deposit of good peat, he made a very beautiful 

 shrub and flower garden in it. We are in a time of doubt about 

 this question, many people, tired of bedding-out, have turfed up their 

 gardens, so that we often see what ought to be a flower garden turfed 

 over. It is the ugliness, cost, and wholly inartistic result of bedding- 

 out that tired people of it, and in many cases it would be well to go 

 back to the old idea of the flower garden near the house. 



A great mistake has been made in the past in placing the Rose 

 garden away from the house. This was often done and told in every 

 book. There was reason for it, perhaps, when 

 The Rose garden, we had nothing but the red Roses what were 

 wrongly called Hybrid Perpetuals. They flowered 

 for such a short time that it did not matter much their being away 

 from the flower garden proper, where we expect a long-continued 

 bloom. The coming of the Tea and China Roses of Indian 

 origin, of longer bloom, has altered the conditions as regards the 

 Rose garden, and the best Roses should be in the flower garden, not 

 by themselves only, but combined with all the other beautiful things 

 that one cares for in a very choice flower garden. When we have to 

 make our Rose and flower garden together, which is the right way, 

 that demands more thought for the position and the shape and the 

 formation of the ground. In old houses there are generally open and 

 more or less square places round the house and near it, which offer 

 good situations for the flower garden. The walls that surround such 

 places do not prevent us from following the picturesque way of 

 gardening. There is unfortunately an idea that, given such square 

 spaces, one must put the plants in geometrical or pattern ways. 

 There is not the slightest foundation for this plea, because nothing 

 can be more set in its surroundings than the cottage or the small town 

 garden, which often surprises us with its picturesque and true 

 effects. 



