Perennials for a Thought-out Garden 199 



the colour of the flowers, but their season of bloom, the height 

 of the plant and its preferences for soil and situation. Three charts 

 are necessary to show the effect of the planting in spring, summer 

 and autumn. If a section that is glorious in May should be 

 barren of bloom a month later, another group of plants must be 

 introduced. If the colours of eighteen and nineteen conflict, it 

 is far easier for the gardener and better for the plants to move 

 one of them on paper than if it were rooted in the earth. Eighteen 

 may be the very plant needed to reconcile seven to six. Five 

 may be most lovely next nineteen. If all the permanent plants 

 needed for a border cannot be afforded at the outset, or if no 

 desired perennial will supply a crying need for a certain colour at 

 a certain season, recourse may be had to annuals for quick results. 

 Restraint in a garden, as at a feast, is preferable to excess. 

 It is a safe rule to limit one's list to the indispensables at first, and 

 never to buy a plant whose need is not realised in one's saner 

 moments after the spring garden fever subsides. Fitting flowers 

 to suit one another, the climate, the soil and exposure, it may be 

 inferred, is an intricate scientific and artistic feat. The foreign 

 firm who make a speciality of hardy herbaceous borders arranged 

 for continuous bloom and harmonious colour effects for English 

 gardens, fill a want deeply felt by the inexperienced on our side 

 of the sea. All the plants needed to fill a border one hundred and 

 twenty-five feet long by eighteen feet wide, as indicated on a spaced 

 and carefully marked chart, are supplied for about four hundred 

 and sixty dollars. Few Americans take their perennials so seri- 

 ously. Nor are many of us willing to miss the fun of blundering 

 along through many mistakes, if need be, toward an ideal which 

 ever eludes attainment as it rises higher and higher, year by year, 

 with the growth of the critical faculty. Every zealous amateur 



