LITTLE GARDENS 



grance in the spring; then, after the fading, you 

 could take out and store the bulbs for fall plant- 

 ing, and fill their places with summer bloomers. 

 It is one of the temptations to a yard owner to 

 work his ground to the limit, having so little of 

 it; and while it insures constant bloom, to buy 

 potted plants at the greenhouses, plunge them 

 into the soil, keep them for a fortnight or so, 

 then cast them out to make room for novelties, 

 your real gardener will not do this. To say 

 nothing of the cost, it is best to grow up with the 

 plant children, to know their traits. You love 

 them the better — pretty dependents — for minis- 

 tering to their needs, and they reward the care 

 with docile behavior and a cheery aspect. My 

 own choice for a yard is for a preponderance of 

 perennials, the good, hardy, reliable, free-bloom- 

 ers of our grandmothers' gardens, that we can 

 watch for in April and May with a certainty as 

 absolute as the rising of Orion a few weeks 

 earlier. 



The fixity of this arrangement in strips will 



make the yard seem longer, for when we break 



lines of that kind we seem to shorten them. We 



could soften the asperity of the plan in sundry 



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