AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
October, 1912 
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Perennials and of Annuals, near Cornish, New Hampshire. 
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This season’s Fall planting should produce a garden as in- 
teresting as this one 
Fall Planting for the Permanent Flower Garden 
By Gardner Teall 
Photographs by Jessie Tarbox Beals and Nathan R. Graves 
APPILY the time is passed when the Ameri- 
can home garden-maker simply looked upon 
the patch of ground at his disposal as being 
merely a bit of practice acreage in which, as 
fancy dictated, he might plant here and 
there a few seeds of flowers or of vege- 
tables in haphazard confusion or skimpy orderliness, feeling 
that the whole matter was one of experiment, and that fail- 
ure on the part of the seeds to produce what was expected 
of them, or even to come up at all, was not attended with 
any disappointments of serious consequence. That was the 
time when the man of the house attended to the buying of 
vegetable seeds, leaving to the housewife all things con- 
nected with the seeding of the flower garden. I do not know 
why it is that our grandfathers and our grandmothers 
should have looked upon all gardening as a pursuit to be 
divided between themselves; why the raising of vegetables 
should have been considered a manly occupation or recre- 
ation and the growing of flowers not, but that is as it seems 
to have been until comparatively a few years ago. Now, 
fortunately, the joys of gardening are shared alike by 
master and mistress, the children, the young and the old, and 
a statesman may wax enthusiastic over his garden of rare 
pinks or a milliner over her bed of asparagus without any 
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one’s criticizing the choice of either in garden planting. 
Nowadays, we do not confine our efforts to Springtime 
visits to the grocery store for a package of Petunia seed, a 
parcel of Sweet Peas, or an envelope of Candytuft, content 
to sprinkle in over a little dirt in a bed that occupies a cor- 
ner of the “yard,” sighing the while that we cannot seem 
to raise the good old flowers to the state of perfection they 
reached in the old-time gardens of ante-bellum days, of 
Colonial memories; instead we are happy to have discov- 
ered the difference between those flowers which have to be 
planted every year—the Annuals—and those others—the 
Perennials—which will continue to come up season after 
season from the original stock when once the seeds take 
root, and we have come to plan for permanent gardens, that 
shall fill our hearts with the joyousness their beauty will 
lend throughout the season when Nature dons her loveliest 
raiment. We have come, too, to understand that just stick- 
ing a seed or two or a root into the ground anywhere is not 
all there is to gardening. Year after year our study of the 
A, B, C of home outdoor floriculture initiates us into the 
simple mysteries of garden craft, so that our gardens to-day 
are as lovely as those that ever gladdened the sight of the 
American home garden-makers of the early period. 
Fall planting is an important part of the maintenance 
