THE GENERAL PLAN OR THEORY OF THE PLAGE 7 



precision. The rows- are straight. There are no missing plants. 

 The earth is mellow and fresh. Weeds are absent. One 

 takes his friends to the garden, and he makes pictures of it. 

 By late June or early July, the plants have begun to sprawl 

 and to get out of shape. The bugs have taken some of them. 

 The rows are no longer trim and precise. The earth is hot 

 and dry. The weeds are making headway. By August and 

 September, the garden has lost its early regularity and freshness. 

 The camera is put aside. The visitors are not taken to it: 

 the gardener prefers to go alone to find the melon or the 

 tomatoes, and he comes away as soon as he has secured his 

 product. Now, as a matter of fact, the garden has been going 

 through its regular seasonal growth. It is natural that it be- 

 come ragged. It is not necessary that weeds conquer it; but 

 I suspect that it would be a very poor garden, and certainly 

 an uninteresting one, if it retained the dress of childhood at 

 the time when it should develop the personalities of age. 



There are two types of outdoor gardening in which the prog- 

 ress of the season is not definitely expressed, — in the carpet- 

 bedding kind, and in the subtropical kind. I hope that my 

 reader will get a clear distinction in these matters, for it is 

 exceedingly important. The carpet-bedding gardening is 

 the making of figure-beds in house-leeks and achyranthes 

 and coleus and sanitalia, and other things that can be grown 

 in compact masses and possibly sheared to keep them within 

 place and bounds; the reader sees these beds in perfection in 

 some of the parks and about florists' establishments; he will 

 understand at once that they are not meant in any way to ex- 

 press the season, for the difference between them in September 

 and June is only that they may be more perfect in September. 

 The subtropical gardening (plates IV and V) is the planting out 

 of house-grown stuff, in order to produce given effects, of such 

 plants as palms, dracenas, crotons, caladiums, papyrus, together 

 with such luxuriant things as dahlias and cannas and large 



