216 FRITZ BAHR'S COMMERCIAL FLORICULTURE 



get better results. If you are asked to lay out a perennial garden, 

 don't get into fancy designs and try to make beds of fantastic 

 shapes. Straight beds four feet wide and as long as you want 

 them, with 4-ft. sod paths between look better and answer better 

 in such a garden. If these beds are properly filled with groups of 

 plants, taking into consideration their flowering periods and their 

 colors, and if a few annuals are used in connection with them, you 

 can have them look good all season. 



On small grounds where it is not possible to allow for a perennial 

 or hardy flowering plant garden, it is often an easy matter to widen 

 out a shrubbery border 2 feet or so and plant perennials along the 

 edge. This may also be done with shrubbery beds of which the side 

 facing the lawn or residence can be widened out and used. With a 

 background of conifers or shrubs, you overcome, to some extent, 

 the naked appearance of hardy stock which happens to be out of 

 bloom. 



Potted Perennials for Spring and Summer Trade 



If you sell your perennials at retail in your immediate neighbor- 

 hood, your patrons are bound to appreciate the fact that they 

 obtain better stock than is possible when the plants have to travel 

 long distances. A plant with naked roots is not to be compared 

 with one delivered with a nice ball of earth around its roots and 

 the latter is out of the question when you ship the stock. But even 

 such plants can be lifted only during a comparatively short time in 

 Spring. After they start into growth, it isn't long before you hurt 

 them too much by lifting them. To overcome this difficulty and 

 to make it possible to sell certain varieties practically all Summer, 

 plants in pots are made use of. 



It cannot always be said that when, in Spring, the plants in 

 the field are ready," the people who want them are. Many of your 

 customers overlook the ordering of what they need until too late; 

 or, as is often the case with new grounds, the beds or borders where 

 they are to be planted are not ready. With a good batch of plants 

 in pots, you can prolong the planting season for weeks and even if 

 such stock as has been planted in Midsummer doesn't make much 

 of a showing that season, one still gains by planting it, for the plants 

 will get so well established before Winter sets in that they become 

 far superior to those planted out from the field in the Fall. When 

 you once get your customers to realize that you carry perennials, 

 you wiU have plenty of calls for them long after the regular bedding 

 season is over. 



In order to have plants in 33^-in. or 4-in. pots by May, you 

 should lift field plants in FaU, heel them into a frame and leave 

 them there until about the end of February, after which bring them 



