138 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN 



grow it who has room and a fairly good Eose soil. The 

 long flowering branches were cut a yard or more in length. 

 At the end of each branch was a beautiful bunch of pure, 

 cream-white Eoses, seven or eight in number, with buds 

 in between, and pale, healthy, green leaves down the 

 stem. Two such branches in a narrow-necked vase, 

 bronze or blue or dark green, are an ornament to which 

 nothing can be added for any room, be it in a cottage or a 

 palace. As a decoration for a large dinner-table, nothing 

 can be better than these Eoses when they are in their 

 prime, which, unfortunately, is but for a very short time. 



In the old days of bedding-out, lawns used to be cut 

 up into beds and patterns. Now the fashion has changed, 

 and bedding-out has become so generally condemned that 

 most people have levelled and turfed-over the rounds, 

 stars, crescents, and oblongs that used to enliven their 

 lawns for a short time, at any rate, every autumn. As a 

 result of this reaction, there are now an immense number 

 of large, dull lawns, which as a rule slope slightly away 

 from the house, and often to the south. They are wet in 

 rain, and dry and brown in hot weather. They 

 have their weekly shave with the mowing-machine, and 

 lie baking in the sunshine. The poor plants, which would 

 flower and do weU in the open, are planted at the edges 

 of the shrubberies, where — in a light soil, at any rate — 

 they are robbed and starved into ugliness and failure by 

 their stronger neighbours. 



There are several ways of breaking up lawns. One is 

 by turning the lawns into grass paths, along which the 

 machine runs easily, and making aU the rest into open, 

 informally shaped beds. These can be planted in every 

 kind of way — in bold masses of one thing alone, or at 

 most in mixtures of two, such as Eoses and Violas; 

 Azaleas and LUies ; Carnations and more Violas, or mossy 

 Saxifrages; Campanulas in succession, taU and low- 



