SOME ASPECTS OP^ HARDY FLOWER CULTURE. 



BY A. HERRINGTOX, MADISON, X. J. 



Read before the society, March 4, 1905. 



Notwithstanding all that has been written in the past about 

 style and design, there is no garden so beautiful as that untram- 

 meled by the application of needless geometry to its plan and plant- 

 ing. A certain formality may be necessary and right about the 

 house, but those who tell us the garden as a whole should be a 

 thing of formal design are enemies to true gardening, not perhaps 

 of wilful intention, but from lack of knowledge or inability to see 

 and appreciate how their much vaunted formahty circumscribes 

 or prohibits the possibilit}^ of good gardening by limiting us to 

 the use of a few forms and types of vegetation adapted to the 

 formal scheme. 



Hence the floral poverty and meagre beauty of too many so- 

 called gardens, wherein no place can be found for the planting of 

 those beautiful flowers that tell the story of the year from the 

 moment the frost relinquishes its grip of the earth till the time 

 when vegetation again goes to its winter rest. In many gardens 

 where place can be found for hosts of beautiful hardy flowers, 

 they are not to be seen there because of the prevalent erroneous 

 notions that the flower garden is a thing apart of itself, a set 

 arrangement of cultivated beds and borders formal or other- 

 wise. 



Some attempt is made to display floral beauty, some good results 

 are seen, but so long as our efforts begin and end there we are 

 merely prospecting ; we have not discovered the actual mine of 

 floral treasure whose outcroppings are not thus localized. 



This is especially true of hard}' flowers, and when we come to 

 a right understanding of the subject Ave ought to find in hardy 

 vegetation the main source of garden embellishment, just as in 

 our permanent plantations we use only hardy trees and shrubs. 



