EDGING AND CARPETING PLANTS 285 



ideal. The fraxinella or gas plant is very permanent and is 

 redolent of lemon, but it is rather tall for gardens, a little too oily, 

 and too slow to propagate. Lemon balm is delicious, but rather 

 homely and coarse for a refined flower garden. The only native 

 shrubs I know that have fragrant leaves are bayberry, sweet fern, 

 and aromatic sumach, but the first two are scraggly and all would 

 require too much clipping. Sage and the other culinary herbs 

 make an interesting collection in a vegetable garden, but they are 

 rather coarse for a flower garden. Probably the best fragrant- 

 leaved plants we can have in the North for edging gardens are the 

 white-flowered varieties of thyme. Beside the common thyme, 

 there is creeping thyme, of which the lemon-scented and woolly 

 leaved sorts are varieties. These are evergreen in the North, but 

 how attractive is a question. 



The garden is not the only place where an Englishman likes 

 to see every foot of ground covered. He has the same ideal for 

 his estate and for his whole island. This is nature's ideal too. 

 For, wherever man leaves a bare spot nature attempts to cover it, 

 though she may be able to do so only with plants we call "weeds. 1 * 

 Bare earth is not essentially ugly, but if it remains so for a long 

 time it suggests barrenness, poverty, unhappiness. On the other 

 hand, luxuriance suggests peace and plenty. Consequently the 

 Englishman often covers the ground beneath the trees in his park 

 with ivy, producing great expanses of evergreen verdure, a glimpse 

 of which may be had at plate 93. In America we leave such 

 spots bare instead of going to the woods to see what nature does 

 under beech, pine, or maple. We have not yet found cheap but 

 fitting methods of bringing all the distant parts of an estate up to 

 a high pitch of luxuriance, beauty, and joyousness. We can and 

 should. And the solution lies in our own native plants of low 



