August, 1909 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



21 



summer feature. Thus, even if expense need 

 not be considered, we miss the charm of age 

 in this plant. 



Geraniums, also, are only a summer feature 

 but they are so easily carried over the winter 

 that they are worth serious consideration. 

 They have a wonderful variety of odor in 

 their foliage, but some varieties have bad 

 colors which would make havoc in a garden. 

 The nutmeg geranium, however, has white 

 flowers and white is the safest color in edging. 

 I wish some one would make a collection of 

 all the geraniums that have different odors — 

 the apple, lemon, nutmeg, rose, etc., and tell 

 us about their suitability for edging. 



Obviously, however, a fairly permanent 

 plant should be the ideal. The fraxinella 

 or gas plant is very permanent and is redolent 

 of lemon, but it is rather tall for gardens, a 

 little too oily, and too slow to propagate. 

 Lemon balm is delicious, but rather homely 

 and coarse for a refined flower garden. The 

 only native shrubs I know that have fragrant 

 leaves are bayberry, sweet fern and 

 aromatic sumach, but the first two are 

 scraggly and all would require too much 

 clipping. Sage and the other culinary herbs 

 make a very interesting collection in a 

 vegetable garden, but they are rather coarse 

 for a flower garden. Probably the best 

 fragrant-leaved plants we can have in the 

 North for edging gardens are the white- 

 flowered varieties of thyme. Besides the 

 common thyme, there is creeping thyme, 

 of which the lemon-scented and woolly 

 leaved sorts are varieties. These are ever- 

 green in the North, but whether they would 

 be attractive in winter I do not know. 



But the garden is not the only place where 

 an Englishman likes to see every foot of 

 ground covered. He has the same ideal for 

 his estate and for his whole island. This 

 is Nature's ideal too. For, wherever man 

 leaves a bare spot Nature attempts to cover 

 it, though she may be able to do so only with 

 plants we call "weeds." Bare earth is not 

 essentially ugly, but if it remains so for a 

 long time it suggests barrenness, poverty, 

 unhappiness. On the other hand, luxuri- 

 ance suggests peace and plenty. Conse- 

 quently the Englishman often covers the 

 ground beneath the trees in his park with 

 ivy, producing great expanses of evergreen 

 verdure, a glimpse of which may be had on 

 page 1 8. In America we leave such spots 

 bare instead of going to the woods to see what 

 Nature does under beech, pine, or maple. 

 We have not yet found cheap but fitting 

 methods of bringing all the distant parts of 

 an estate up to a high pitch of luxuriance, 

 beauty and joyousness. We can and should. 

 And the solution lies in our own native 

 plants of low growth that have a genius for 

 spreading, such as Virginia creeper, part- 

 ridge berry, wintergreen, the larger American 

 cranberry, etc. 



I cannot go into this great question of cover 

 plants. I can merely suggest some of its 

 possibilities. This principle can be applied 

 even . to formal flower beds. A circular bed 

 of Japanese flowering crabs was carpeted 

 with heath. Here we have a bed that not 

 only possesses two periods of bloom, but is 



Tufted pansies in the front row, then tea roses, then box. Fragment of a huge parterre, in which 70.0OO 

 violas are used for edging rose beds. W. W. Astor's 



even attractive in winter by reason of the 

 evergreen covering of heaths. Is this not 

 better and cheaper than planting every 

 year with tender bedding plants? 



But the most astonishing bit of greenery 

 I saw in English woods was a carpet of moss 

 at Cliveden, the home of W. W. Astor. 

 The picture on page 20, gives scarcely any 

 idea of its charm. Imagine walking for a 

 quarter of a mile under century-old beeches 

 on a gravel driveway that has been absolutely 

 covered with a thick carpet of velvety moss 

 of the richest luxuriance! The important 



thing to learn from this is that the finest of all 

 mosses reaches its highest beauty under 

 beech trees and whenever we have a chance 

 to make beech dominant we have a chance to 

 reproduce that magical yellowish green 

 atmosphere which is the most enchanting 

 that can permeate any forest. 



No one of us now living may hope to see 

 America as a whole smiling with the luxuri- 

 ance and finish of old England, but every 

 one of us who owns a bit of land can 

 bring every foot of it up to the English stan- 

 dard of efficiency and loveliness. 







W; U >>v. 



i*£ 



* '--&M 



**$*# 



The horned violet (Viola cornuta) chief parent of the tufted or bedding pansies 



