The Winning Designs 
given to the colour question. Don’t think that your 
ideas in the autumn or spring will prove entirely suc- 
cessful when the flowering period arrives ; it will take 
several years of careful revision to get a correct 
arrangement. Don’t expect too much the first year. 
Now you may argue that any effects so difficult to 
obtain, and with the many adverse circumstances aris- 
ing in the creation of them, are scarcely worth the 
trouble involved. Is anything that is worth anything 
obtained in this world without trouble? I assure you 
that having once achieved something in the way of 
success in the direction I have endeavoured to point 
out, you will lose all appreciation of the heterogeneous 
medleys we have become accustomed to under the 
designation of ‘‘ herbaceous borders.”’ 
There are other points in the arranging of such a 
border to be remembered, and one is its contours. 
There should be no rigid lines or rows of any one sub- 
ject therein, but throughout the effect must be undu- 
lating and broken—to use a simple illustration, it would 
be an arrangement of hills and valleys. The colour 
is always brought right down to the edge of the border, 
and the arrangement of plants is such that frequently 
back position colours are seen through light masses 
of flower or foliage in the foreground. It is a mistake 
to so arrange all the plants that they slope rigidly 
down from back to front. Try and get a little of the 
bouquet effects into your borders. One other point 
and I have done, it is the edge, or front row, planting. 
Now this is, in my opinion, the most neglected portion 
of the average border, and far too frequently I come 
across rich masses of colour in the background whilst 
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