Perennials for a Thought-out Garden 209 



raw roadsides and waste places. The old-fashioned garden, 

 now happily in vogue again, is composed almost exclusively of 

 hardy perennials. Its box-edged parterres overflow with them. 

 Even the modern formal garden fittingly employs such plants as 

 hollyhocks, foxgloves, larkspurs, Canterbury bells and lilies, 

 whose tall, straight spires of bloom repeat the lines of pillared 

 porch and pergola. It needs a more riotous profusion of growth 

 and bloom in it to soften the architectural severity that is usually 

 too apparent. But, generally speaking, perennials are informal 

 in character, and many kinds are better adapted to naturalistic 

 than to formal treatment. 



Plants of especially coarse or vigorous habit like the hardy 

 sunflowers, golden glow, boltonia, day primroses, orange day 

 lilies and hollyhocks, are often set out in bold masses among 

 the shrubbery where, for a time, they are strikingly effective. 

 Their flowers, which appear after the shrubs have finished bloom 

 ing, keep the shrubbery gay until frost. But shrubs and peren 

 nials, both voracious, soon deplete the soil, and unless an extra 

 amount of food be supplied, both deteriorate. Nevertheless it 

 would be a thousand pities never to use them together. Shrubs 

 are so dark and rich a foil for flowers blooming earlier or later 

 than they, that they make a most effective background, especially 

 when used to take off the curse from an enclosing fence on a 

 suburban plot or to partially border a lawn. Do not place the 

 shrubs in a straight line at the back of the border only, but in 

 dense and light groups, some of the lower kinds running out to 

 the front of the irregular edge of the border and flush with it, 

 some receding almost to the fence, and so giving variety of setting 

 and exposure to the perennial flowers in the graceful, sinuous 

 outlines of the tall and low shrubbery. The green wall of a 



