THE RIGHT USE OF ANNUALS 171 



will take the place of those of the bulbs. Or these 

 spring-sown annuals may be placed among autumn 

 Crocuses if the Crocuses are not too thickly planted, 

 and then their season will be over and they can be 

 cleared away just when the Crocuses begin to throw 

 up their bloom. When annuals, such as Nemophila, 

 Silene, and Saponaria, are sown so as to flower in 

 spring, their places can be taken in turn by the more 

 delicate half-hardy annuals or bedding plants that are 

 put out at the beginning of June. It seems to the 

 present writer that these half-hardy things are often 

 unjustly decried, because they are nearly always mis- 

 used. The common practice is to plant them in masses, 

 so that large spaces of the garden have to undergo vio- 

 lent changes and the ugliness that must result from 

 such changes, often when the garden ought to be in 

 its prime. The real use of half-hardy things, whether 

 perennials or annuals, is to fill up blank spaces in the 

 border, caused by the dying down of spring bulbs or by 

 any mischance. There is no reason whatever why you 

 should always plant fifty Cannas, or ivy-leaved Gera- 

 niums, or Tobacco plants, where you plant one, or why 

 one part of the garden should be filled only with hardy 

 and another with half-hardy plants. There is no neces- 

 sary incongruity between plants that are hardy and 

 plants that are tender. It is merely convention that 

 keeps them apart, as we may see from the Dahlia and 

 the Gladiolus, which are half-hardy plants usually 

 treated in a rational way and placed among hardy 

 plants in the border. If we treat other half-hardy 



