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throw them by scores to be trodden under foot. She can rarely 

 bring herself to treat her pet so cruelly, and the result is that 

 in almost every garden may be seen ten plants occupying the 

 space needed for the full development of one, all crowding 

 each other out of all shape and comeliness, and finally pushing 

 up a few struggling terminal flowers to beg a gleam of sunlight. 

 Accept good advice ; believe in the " survival of the fittest" 

 and thin boldly. Make three thinnings : the first when an 

 inch in height ; again when two or three inches, and finally 

 in a week from this thin to as few as your conscience will 

 allow, tlicn shut your eyes and pull up at least half of what 

 remains. Have you ever seen the normal form of our common 

 garden flowering plants ? When crowded into an area of a 

 few square inches, none of them has liberty to reveal itself to 

 us. Even that small plant, the Pansy, or the Portulacca, re- 

 quires a square foot of room to enable it to develop tlie sym- 

 metry of its structure ; and this word symmetry belongs to 

 every plant of tiie garden ; it is safe to say that every one of 

 the hundreds of varieties found in our gardens would display 

 the beauty of symmetry in its proportions were it allowed to 

 develop its normal form. 



A word about some peculiarities of one or two of the varie- 

 ties in the list given. But few people appear to be aware of 

 the capacity of the verbena for self-seeding and the great 

 variety in the colors of plants thus grown. There is an 

 impression that the colors are nearly all confined to the purple 

 tints, and that the flower heads are not well filled out. On 

 my own grounds which are a good loam, a little inclined to 

 sand at the surface, with a sub-soil of hard pan, even after the 

 land, where the verbena grew the year previous, has been 

 ploughed, the plants will come up ten times as thick as they 

 should be allowed to stand. In one bed I counted twenty-five 

 difi'erent colors and shades; as many as were to be found in 

 the bed adjoining, raised directly from seed, hand-planted the 

 same season. The one color all verbenas raised from seed are 

 deficient in, is scarlet, but this applies as generally to hand- 

 planted beds as to the self-seeding. 

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