FLOWER GARDENS 67 



lent and effective, while the circle, though practically 

 available, seldom fits in as well with an easy and agree- 

 able line of path. 



When it is desirable to make a great bed of some kind 

 of low plant, a device is sometimes employed where a 

 subsidiary and narrow path, made usually of grass, is 

 carried around the interior of the large bed, thus secur- 

 ing access for various purposes to the inside of the mass 

 of foliage or flowers (see page 65). Grass is better 

 suited to these narrower minor paths than gravel, even 

 though the main walks of the garden are gravel, and 

 though only low-growing plants are used, as indeed must 

 always be the case with beds thus divided. As a rule, it 

 seems simpler and really more effective to make a bed 

 not wider than six or eight feet, if circumstances will 

 permit. 



In selecting plants and arranging them in beds, it is 

 always well to seek to establish them in large colonies, 

 one kind occupying, if possible, an entire bed, or two 

 beds on either side of the path. 



Much of the beauty of many flowers is lost when one 

 fails to see them in large masses. It is, moreover, not 

 well to make the effect too monotonous by keeping up 

 everywhere except on the borders the low, even, flat 

 effect. Clumps of Eulalias, symmetrically arranged (page 

 59), tend to vary the sky line and to please the eye as it 

 wanders over the surface of the garden, and even in each 

 bed a variation of sky line can be produced by using in 

 the same mass several kinds of the one species which 

 differ in height. 



There is a system of garden arrangement which is 

 simple and quaint and homelike, and that is a division 

 into large squares, or parallelograms, which consist of 



