30 FLOWER GARDENING 
you mentally distinguish the pine as an evergreen 
tree or the grape as a deciduous vine. 
A frequent cause of failure with flowers is what 
may as well be called footlessness as anything else. 
That is about what it is; an aimless plunging into 
the task with good intentions but an appalling 
lack of common sense. Footlessness cuts a strip 
fifteen inches wide out of the lawn on the west side 
of the house, and quite near it, and plants in what 
it is pleased to call a border some roses. or some 
peonies, without any enrichment of the poor soil. 
Common sense would have ascertained before a 
spade was put in the ground that roses and peonies 
must have a sunnier position, that they are gross 
feeders and that without a wider border the grass 
would encroach on their territory in no time. 
Footlessness plants sweet peas in dry, poor soil, 
three weeks late at that, and then wonders why 
the woman next door ‘‘always has such good luck”’; 
it undertakes to establish a rose garden in an ob- 
viously unsuitable location; it piles manure on top 
of foxgloves, which become rotten pulp before 
spring, and then cannot see why they should “‘win- 
ter kill”; it takes home plants that friends have 
given and sticks them in the ground with so little 
care and thought that the wail that they “didn’t 
live” goes up; it transplants hollyhocks six inches 
apart and pansies fifteen—it does a thousand things 
wrong. And all for the want of taking pains to 
find out the right road to travel. 
Taking pains looms large in the garden gospel. 
