THE WELL-CONSIDERED GARDEN 



centre, and iris and lilies in four other spaces near 

 the rest. I endeavored to produce irregular cross- 

 wise banks of color from the far end of the garden 

 to the part nearest the house — scarlet, orange, and 

 yellow, with a fair sprinkling of hollyhocks in yel- 

 low and white on the more distant edge; before 

 these, crowds of white flowers, gray-leaved plants 

 and blue-flowering things; and, nearest of all to 

 the beholder, brighter and paler pinks. 



The result was nothing but an ugly muddle — 

 indescribably so when one happened to be in the 

 midst of the garden itself. For two or three years 

 I bore with this unhappy condition of things; in- 

 deed, nothing but the fact that the flowers con- 

 ducted themselves in remarkably luxuriant and 

 brilliant fashion, due to the freshness and richness 

 of the soil, could have saved me from seeing sooner 

 the silly mistake I had made; when, chancing to 

 look down upon the garden from an upper win- 

 dow, the real state of things suddenly revealed 

 itself, and from that day I set about to plan and 

 plant in totally different fashion. 



With Mr. Robinson, I feel against the wretched 



carpet-bedding system, while I quite agree, on the 



clher hand, with the spokesman for the formalists, 



Reginald Blomfield, who declared that there is no 



66 



