178 THE BEGINNER'S GARDEN BOOK 



Better, to my mind, is a border, which is explained by its 

 name, being an edging of flowers along a wall, a shrubbery, 

 or the house. Indeed, I advise making a flower bed into a 

 border by putting shrubs to the north of it, or behind it. 

 If the flower garden must stand by itself, surround it with 

 shrubbery, walling it off from the rest of the place. Then 

 make the garden a border with a wavy edge all around the 

 inside. The center will be grass, or will have grass paths, 

 and the whole garden becomes sheltered and homelike. 



The planting of such a garden must be determined largely 

 by its shape and the amount of shade. Shade-loving and 

 sun-loving plants will have their places naturally marked out 

 for them ; but besides this, the lower plants should naturally 

 stand at the edges, the taller ones farther back. Thus a free- 

 standing bed will have the plants rising gradually from the 

 edges, till the middle of the bed will hold the tallest. A 

 border will have its flowers graded upward from the edges 

 to meet the line of the shrubs. 



It is a good deal of a question whether to set flowers in 

 lines or in groups. Lines are simplest to plan, and easiest 

 to care for. Yet a set of lines, all exactly alike, and running 

 parallel, looks very stiff. Their color at least ought to be 

 broken. While it is quite proper to have the edge marked 

 with a line of one kind of low plants, inside this the plants 

 may probably best be arranged with plants in groups, ac- 

 cording to sizes and colors. Do not forget that both size 

 and color are important in plant-neighbors, and train your 

 eye, by constant study of the gardens that you see, to find 

 pleasing combinations or contrasts. This is not natural 

 to boys ; yet there are few more pleasant or satisfactory 

 accomplishments, not merely in gardening but in the whole 

 arrangement of things about us, than the ability to plan 

 modest and fine color groups. 



