30 GARDENING FOE PLEASURE. 



* 



A row of closely planted evergreens at H serves to break 

 the force of the winds ; the suggestions as to the other 

 details in the preceding plan, (fig. 6), apply to this also. 



CHAPTEK X. 



PLANTING OF LAWNS AND FLOWER-BEDS. 



The subject of lawn planting, including the proper 

 setting and grouping of trees and shrubs, and their most 

 effective disposal, is too extended for the scope of this 

 book. These matters belong to works upon landscape 

 gardening, and are ably treated in those by Downing, 

 Kemp, Weidenmann, Scott, and others. But the plant- 

 ing of flower-beds comes properly within our limits. The 

 old-fashioned mixed borders of four or six feet wide along 

 the walks of the fruit or vegetable garden, were usually 

 planted with hardy herbaceous plants, the tall growing at 

 the back, with the lower growing sorts in front. These, 

 when there was a good collection, gave a bloom of varied 

 color throughout the entire growing season. But the 

 more modern style of flower borders has quite displaced 

 such collections, and they are now but little seen, unless 

 in very old gardens, or in botanical collections. Then 

 again, we have the mixed borders of bedding plants, a 

 heterogeneous grouping of all kinds of tropical plants, 

 still holding to the plan of either placing the highest at 

 the back of the border if it has only one walk, or if a bed 

 has a walk on each side, the highest in the middle, and 

 the plants sloping down to the walk on each side. The 

 mixed system still has its advocates, who deprecate the 

 modern plan of massing in color as being too formal, and 

 too unnatural a way to dispose of flowers. But be that 



