THE GENERAL PLAN OR THEORY OF THE PLACE 7 
precision. The rows are straight. There are no missing plants. 
The earth is mellow and fresh. Weeds are absent. One 
takes his friends to the garden, and he makes pictures of it. 
By late June or early July, the plants have begun to sprawl 
and to get out of shape. The bugs have taken some of them. 
The rows are no longer trim and precise. The earth is hot 
and dry. The weeds are making headway. By August and 
September, the garden has lost its early regularity and freshness. 
The camera is put aside. The visitors are not taken to it: 
the gardener prefers to go alone to find the melon or the 
tomatoes, and he comes away as soon as he has secured his 
product. Now, asa matter of fact, the garden has been going 
through its regular seasonal growth. It is natural that it be- 
come ragged. It is not necessary that weeds conquer it; but 
I suspect that it would be a very poor garden, and certainly 
an uninteresting one, if it retained the dress of childhood at 
the time when it should develop the personalities of age. 
There are two types of outdoor gardening in which the prog- 
ress of the season is not definitely expressed, — in the carpet- 
bedding kind, and in the subtropical kind. I hope that my 
reader will get a clear distinction in these matters, for it is 
exceedingly important. The carpet-bedding gardening is 
the making of figure-beds in house-leeks and achyranthes 
and coleus and sanitalia, and other things that can be grown 
in compact masses and possibly sheared to keep them within 
place and bounds; the reader sees these beds in perfection in 
some of the parks and about florists’ establishments; he will 
understand at once that they are not meant in any way to ex- 
press the season, for the difference between them in September 
and June is only that they may be more perfect in September. 
The subtropical gardening (plates IV and V) is the planting out 
of house-grown stuff, in order to produce given effects, of such 
plants as palms, dracenas, crotons, caladiums, papyrus, together 
with such luxuriant things as dahlias and cannas and large 
