Round the Year in the Garden 



continue to restrict your choice to those few kinds that 

 are ubiquitous? 



Half the joy of gardening lies in trying fresh flowers ; 

 why plant a garden at all, if only to use such plants as 

 are grown to perfection in public parks and gardens? 

 The garden at home should be different ; it should possess 

 individuality, even in its selection of bulbs. Having 

 obtained the right catalogue, do not merely turn its pages 

 casually with an admiring glance at its fine illustrations, 

 but delve into the store of good things; order them 

 and plant them and watch with a gardener's joy the 

 coming to life of something you have never seen before. 

 Then shall your garden have an interest perennial and 

 ever new. Just a few words concerning planting, then 

 together let us search a catalogue that I will choose. 



Concerning planting. Everyone knows that ordinary 

 herbaceous plants grow better in ground that has been 

 deeply dug and manured than in that which has been 

 merely forked over ; that is a truism. Yet lots of people 

 believe that bulbs will grow anywhere. So they will, after 

 a fashion ; even if you plant Hyacinths (as I have seen 

 done) so that only half the bulb is beneath the soil they 

 will blossom, because, fortunately for the happy-go-lucky 

 gardener, Hyacinths are more or less independent of soil 

 and will flower if given only water in which to grow. 

 But what a travesty of gardening such planting is ! 

 There is no need to dig a trench to grow bulbs to per- 

 fection, but the soil must be stirred to a reasonable 

 depth, say 18 inches, which does not necessitate laborious 

 digging. Given this, and as much sand as you can 

 afford (all bulbs like plenty of sand), together with a 

 fair sprinkling of bonemeal and wood ashes some 12 

 inches below the surface, and there remains but to plant 

 the bulbs at the proper depth, and watch and wait for 

 the first days of spring. 



How deep should bulbs be planted? Some of the 

 specialists put 6 inches of soil over their May-flowering 



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