NINETEENTH CENTURY 299 



many grasped it eagerly. Mr. William Robinson was the first 

 to point out the true remedy. Although he advocated a 

 complete revolution in the garden, and brought in a new 

 style, known as " wild gardening," and had Kttle sympathy 

 with bedding at all, he helped to make it less stiff and more 

 lasting by pointing out that less tender plants might have as 

 good an effect, and give a longer period of interest to the beds. 

 One of the first gardens given up to formal beds he prescribed 

 for was Shrublands, where at his suggestion they were filled 

 with carnations, roses, and other hardy plants. Masses of 

 colour and contrasts were obtained by groups of tall scarlet 

 Lobelia surrounded by Centaurea ragusina, and similar com- 

 binations with violas or " tufted pansies," Pentstemons, 

 Snapdragons, and so on. In many gardens more permanent 

 flowers were placed in beds which had for fifty years been given 

 up to Geraniums. Paeonies, with daffodils between the clumps, 

 so that the yellow should appear among the deep red spring 

 growth, with auratum lilies to rise from out the dark green 

 foliage when the blooms were over, and many such-like effects, 

 gradually came to be practised. The bringing back into 

 gardens the numerous hardy plants which were banished, 

 and in many cases ruthlessly torn up and thrown away, when 

 the rage for " bedding-out " came in, was the greatest improve- 

 ment of the end of the nineteenth century. They once again 

 began to hold their proper place, and with all the new species 

 which every year came to swell the list of those which will 

 endure our cold chmate, more lovely effects could be pro- 

 duced than were possible with the stiff bedding plants of forty 

 years before. Only a few people wished to discard these half- 

 hardy things altogether. Green-houses, a blaze of bright 

 colours with tuberous Begonias, or some such flowers, are a 

 wonderful sight, and even from a practical point of view it 

 is a good plan to make room in the houses by planting out some 

 of these in the summer months. Very different is this arrange- 

 ment from devoting all the glass to nurture up geraniums to 

 fill the whole garden. Bacon's aim was to have flowers in 

 the garden during every month of the year, and in his essay 

 he mentions some for each successive season. After a lapse 

 of three centuries it dawned upon gardeners that it ought to 



