PREFACE 
O Perpetui Fiori del Eterna Letizia 
T is prudent perhaps for many of us to have our pleasure gardens 
shaped for us by an expert wiser than we may hope to be. A trained 
eye, long study of old forms, and that knowledge which is born only of 
experience, make possible a beauty of outline and insure a perfection of 
detail in a project which in the minds of most of us is a desire rather than 
a definite conception. Yet he who truly loves his garden will not relin- 
quish altogether the happy task of creating it. For him it is the centre of 
bright imaginings. He dreams of it asleep and awake, until from among 
the multitude of his thoughts there flashes some happy vision finished in 
all things, like the completed picture which the painter sees on the white 
canvas before him. Quickly before it fades he rushes to his task. But 
to the amateur, garden catalogues are often a snare and most books a de- 
lusion. Search as he may, these helpers serve him little, and as he struggles 
to tind the appropriate flowers with which to paint his picture, the gay 
vision fades and confusion and discouragement ensue. 
It is for this gardener that I have made this book and offer it as a full 
palette, to enable him the more readily to paint the picture as he sees it, 
and save him the discouragement of looking in a thousand places for a 
thousand bits of information. However small a part of the garden it may 
be that he himself plans, he will look upon that portion with a kindlier 
eye, and find more in it to love and enjoy than all the rest of the garden 
has to offer. 
With this book I wish my gardener joy of his experiments, and if he 
fails to make his garden altogether as he has imagined it, may he have a fancy 
quick to suggest new visions; for in the possibilities of change lies the im- 
perishable charm of gardens. Forever through past experience shine the 
bright alluring pictures of the future. 
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