it personally, or in any way likes it well enough to take a great deal of 

 trouble about it. To those who know, the garden speaks of itself, for it 

 clearly reflects individual thought and influence ; and it is in these lesser 

 gardens that, with rare and happy exceptions, the watchful care and happy 

 invention of the beneficent individuality stamps itself upon the place. 



There is nothing more interesting to one of these ardent and honest 

 workers than to see the garden of another. Plants that had hitherto 

 been neglected or overlooked are seen used in ways that had never been 

 thought of, and here will be found new combinations of colour that had 

 never been attempted, and methods of use and treatment differing in 

 some manner to those that had been seen before. 



There is nothing like the true gardening for training the eye and 

 mind to the habit of close observation ; that precious acquirement that 

 invests every country object both within and without the garden's bounds 

 with a living interest, and that insensibly builds up that bulk of mentally 

 noted incident or circumstance that, taken in and garnered by that 

 wonderful storehouse the brain, seems there to sort itself, to distribute, to 

 arrange, to classify, to reduce into order, in such a way as to increase the 

 knowledge of something of which there was at first only a mental 

 glimpse ; so to build up in orderly structure a well-founded knowledge of 

 many of those things of every-day out-door life that adds so greatly to its 

 present enjoyment and later usefulness. 



So it comes about that some of us gardeners, searching for ways of 

 best displaying our flowers, have observed that whereas it is best, as a 

 general rule, to mass the warm colours (reds and yellows) rather together, 

 so it is best to treat the blues with contrasts, either of direct comple- 

 mentary colour, or at any rate with some kind of yellow, or with clear 

 white. So that whereas it would be less pleasing to put scarlet flowers 

 directly against bright blue, and whereas flowers of purple colouring can be 

 otherwise much more suitably treated, the juxtaposition of the splendid 

 blues of the perennial Larkspurs with the rich colour of the orange 

 Herring Lily {Liltum croceum) is a bold and grand assortment of colour of 

 the most satisfactory effect. 



This fine Lily is one of those easiest to grow in most gardens. The 

 true flower-lovers, as defined above, take the trouble to find out which are 



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