20 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



any one feel the slightest interest about the 

 hundred little pelargoniums in one bed, or the 

 fifty calceolarias in the next. Each plant is 

 exactly like its neighbour. All individuality 

 has gone, and it is impossible to forget that 

 some four months is the limit of their short 

 lives, and that the next year a new "crop" of 

 pelargoniums and calceolarias, equally without 

 interest or character, will appear in their place. 

 Then too the bedded-out plants are plants with 

 no associations as regards the past. No poet 

 ever sang their beauty, and no legend tells the 

 origin of their birth. Again, they are almost 

 entirely destitute of scent, and to our forefathers 

 at least the scent of flowers was their chief 

 attraction. Often too it is questionable whether 

 a number of small beds cut out of the green 

 turf really looks well; in nine cases out of ten 

 it has a make-shift appearance ; flowers were 

 wanted, and the lawn has been sacrificed. 



" Nothing," says Bacon, " is more pleasant 

 to the eye than green grass nicely shorn/' a 

 sentiment which Mason, in that somewhat tire- 



