20 FLOWER GARDENING 
planning of the garden. Much has to be thought 
out, and thought out means threshed out until 
there is clean winnowing of the impractical from 
the practical. 
Preliminaries out of the way, the paper stage of 
the game passes from memoranda into the definite 
form of a plan to scale. Blessings on the man 
who invented cross-ruled paper; with it laying out 
a garden is child’s play, even for the unmathemat- 
ical mind. This paper comes in sheets, 17x14 
inches, and is ruled in little squares that run thirty- 
six to the square inch. The squares may be called 
any convenient unit from a square foot up, and 
if one sheet of paper is not large enough two or 
more may be pasted together. 
With a steel tape, if you can get hold of one, 
take measurements of the boundaries of the en- 
tire home grounds and the base lines of the house 
and any other buildings. Then get the distance 
of the house from the boundaries and locate by 
further measurements all existing roads, paths, 
trees, shrubs and borders. Having decided on 
your unit, transfer these measurements to the cross- 
ruled sheet and you have a plan of the place all 
ready for laying out the garden by exact scale. 
This plan would better settle only the location and 
size of the garden. 
A large plan of the garden in detail should 
then go on a separate sheet; this to be a working 
scheme for planting. Here it will sometimes be 
found very convenient to call every six squares 
