456 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



less blanks wherever a plant is out of flower. My advice to 

 every amateur is to please himself. There may be often unfor- 

 tunate contrasts of colour in a mixed border, but accidental com- 

 binations will often please more than others which are carefully 

 studied, but which depend upon the variable caprice of parti- 

 cular plants. Make whatever arrangement you please, you are 

 sure to hear plenty of criticism and to get plenty of gratuitous 

 advice, and if you acted on it all you would change the place of 

 every plant in your borders two or three times in a season. Do 

 not imitate other gardens, but try to be original. Gardens 

 would be very dull and uninteresting if all were planned and 

 planted on the same model. Always be studying how you may 

 have more flowers, and let them be so distributed that your 

 garden may seem full at every season. Note times which are 

 deficient in flowers of each particular colour, and look about in 

 other gardens for any which will supplement these deficiencies, 

 so that from the finest Snowdrop to the last Michaelmas Daisy 

 there may be no flowerless time. Above all, display in your 

 chief borders only what you can grow well, and nurse your 

 failures in the background till they are no longer failures. To 

 sum up, study your soil and do your best to improve it ; study 

 the habits of the plants you grow ; keep up a good stock for 

 succession and for replacing losses ; do not think so much of 

 how many species you can grow as of growing nothing which is 

 not ornamental in itself, and which you cannot grow so as to be 

 ornamental. 



As for the material from which these are to be selected, 

 we find endless choice in the nurserymen's catalogues, some of 

 which enumerate about two thousand names of hardy plants, 

 without including florists' flowers. From these I have selected 

 about three hundred, most of them things cultivated at Edge. 

 Shrubs and spring bulbs are not mentioned, though many of 

 them must of course have a place, and florists' flowers must by 

 no means be excluded. In the appendix of names about a 

 hundred of the best plants have a distinguishing mark. 



