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 



other hand, with the spokesman for the formalists, 



Reginald Blomfield, who declared that there is no 



66 



