CHAPTER VI 



A BORDER OF HARDY PERENNIALS 



THE man of moderate means who desires to see his small 

 garden plot a mass of bloom during the summer months, 

 and indeed well on into the autumn, is often at a loss to 

 know how best to achieve his purpose, and at the same time to 

 keep his expenditure within reasonable bounds. His quest for 

 information leads him from time to time to the classic treatises 

 on gardening, and he is told to raise this in heat, to prick that off 

 and harden in a cold frame, to pot on the other, and to pinch out 

 a fourth species of plant, until he recoils in despair from the effort 

 to master the technicalities of the science of horticulture, and 

 either calls in the jobbing gardener to " tidy up " the borders, or 

 abandons the attempt to achieve order out of chaos. 



He is not, perhaps, the owner of a greenhouse and a frame, and 

 even if he were he has not the leisure to devote the many hours 

 that are essential to the successful raising of seedlings or the 

 propagation of cuttings. All these operations are fascinating in the 

 extreme to the amateur who boasts proudly, and not without 

 cause, to his neighbours that he raised that batch of asters from 

 seed, and layered that bed of carnations himself, or that his 

 calceolarias and pentstemons are all from his own cuttings. It is 

 the aim of most amateur gardeners to be able to say, " Alone I 

 did it. This is my own work from start to finish. Not once during 

 the past year have I had to call in professional assistance even 

 for the prosaic but none the less important operation of trenching 

 or digging my borders." 



This is all very laudable and worthy ; but, as I have said, it is 

 not everybody who has the means, the time, or the inclination to 

 attempt such horticultural flights. What, then, is the alternative ? 

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