4 MARCH 



sitting-rooms they are no less necessary. In fact, 

 wherever one lives there are flowers wanted, and 

 consequently the plants in my garden are mainly 

 those whose blossoms are suitable for gathering 

 and arranging in vases, thus paying a double debt 

 in their beds first, for a short space, and after- 

 wards in the rooms wherein I live. 



I am bound to confess that much as I should 

 like to have a real garden wilderness I think it 

 would be impossible to get flowers enough from 

 it to justify me in giving up all my ground to it. 

 Deficiencies would be made up of course from the 

 kitchen plots, whose reserve borders for flowers 

 would be a necessity of the scheme. For the best 

 show in a wild garden is over by July. In April 

 come, with primroses and lungworts, countless bulbs 

 of a hundred kinds ; in May paeonies, fritillaries, 

 poet's narcissus, broom all under a canopy of 

 apple blossom. In June there follows a brilliant 

 display, looking glorious in the long grasses, but 

 from July onward the picture changes. The brown 

 seeding grass is hardly less beautiful, but the 

 flowers thriving in it are fewer and less showy 

 than hitherto. It would be vain to depend upon 

 them for the many purposes for which flowers 

 are required ; so the kitchen borders would be 

 wanted to fill the gaps and to prevent a famine in 

 the land. 



Everything that is not ^needed elsewhere is thrust 

 out into my wild garden. All the bulbs which have 

 bloomed in pots, all the scraps of herbaceous plants 

 whose rampant growth has entailed division, all the 

 seedlings not wanted in the borders these find 



