CHAPTER XX. 



The garden designer works for different ends, and has different objects in view to 

 the collector, or the nurseryman distributor of hardy plants. They collect and display 

 the materials wherewith he composes his harmonies ; and he, not disdaining the full choice 

 presented as an artist prefers a full range of colours wherewith to express his pictorial 

 presentment prefers that the selective material be located in the reserve garden or 

 home nursery, where he can compare colours and educate and protect himself against 

 mistakes in planting the perennial borders. The list given makes no pretence of including 

 more than a fractional number of the really reliable hardy plants to be found in the 

 nurseryman's excellent lists, but is the result of a long experimental selection, and a 

 series of comparative tests, not only of hardiness, but also adaptability to varying soils 

 and localities, and includes only those which do not require special and difficult culti- 

 vation, and are suitable for planting in masses for colour effect. 



To avoid disappointment it is necessary to point out first of all the impossibility of 

 obtaining flower borders which, as certain rhapsodical garden writers suggest, can be 

 maintained continuously gay for about ten months of the year. Successive floral 

 displays may be obtained within a restricted area but not continuously in the same 

 border. White sheets of snowdrops in February under the apple trees, carpets of lovely 

 crocus on the lawns in March, and waving banks of daffodils in the coppice in April, 

 are each in their places delightful, but the intervening patches of bare brown earth 

 amidst the colonies of bloom in the border are inevitable, unless great expense and time 

 are lavished upon them. But notwithstanding whatever has been said in praise of the 

 grand style, which must have display both in season and out of season, the underlying 

 purpose of this work is the encouragement of those garden lovers, who desire to see 

 their gardens grow and develop under their hands in homely beaut}?, and who, without 

 burdening themselves and converting a pleasure into a task, look to them for relaxation 

 and recuperation. 



Such garden lovers as desire the unstudied grace of homely beauty and are content 

 with that which is beautiful in its season, will not mind broad intervening masses of 

 foliage or even patches of soil amidst the large clumps of flower ; there is always the 

 pleasant retrospect and forecast of what has been, or is to be, in seed or bud. If it 

 is imperative that there should be no bare interspaces, then the showy though fleeting 

 annuals may be called upon as reserves, or biennials such as Antirrhinums, Pentstemons 

 or Canterbury Bells, may give a more lasting result ; but annuals, if duly thinned out 

 and given sufficient room to flower and flourish, fulfil the purpose. Some of these 



Successive 



floral 



displays. 



315 



