KOLKKKY TO SCREEN AN AKKUI'l' DANK. 
Another very pretty ornament for the garden is the Rockery, made of rough stones, taste- 
fully laid up, with earth sufficient for the growth of plants suitable for this work. Low growing 
plants with succulent and ornamental foliage are appropriate to the rockery — Portulaca is 
admirable. I would like my readers who have had no experience in this kind of garden 
ornamentation to try a specimen in some retired quarter of the garden, so that if it proves a 
failure no harm will be done. There is nothing 
more interesting than a good rockery, and 
nothing more unsightly than a poor one. To 
be good it must be somewhat natural in appear- 
ance and have an appropriate position, and be 
furnished with suitable and healthy plants. A 
pile of stones thrown together in the center of 
of a lawn looks bad enough, and it would be 
hardly possible to remedy the evil of location 
by any skill in planting ; but a little rockery in 
some retired corner gives variety and beauty to 
the garden scene. 
Few things pleased us more when in Europe 
than the skill exhibited in giving an air of 
rural taste to small city lots, many of them so 
very small that few Americans would be 
willing to attempt ornamental gardening on so 
Ipjljll diminutive a scale. And yet, if we can make 
MMllij a parlor or sitting-room beautiful in winter 
with a few plants, why can we not make a 
small paradise of a little twenty-foot-square 
" front yard?" Many of the yards we refer to 
were not more than twenty feet in width, and 
)'et remarkable as specimens of taste. Some 
of these little gardens were attached to houses 
ill rows ; others belonged to what are known 
as semi-detached cottages — that is, two only 
joined together. 
We give a specimen of one of these little 
front gardens, or, as they are sometimes called, 
entrance courts. The lots are sometimes so 
from the center to allow of free passage on one 
□ 
BALCONY GARDEN. 
narrow that the raised bed is made several feet 
side. The English people seem to love seclusion, and so the front yard is usually bounded by a 
wall on every side, as we have, in a measure, shown in the engraving, and would be fearfully 
unsightly but for the fact that these walls are ornamented, and sometimes concealed with climbers 
and other beautiful plants. The ornamental border that surrounds the central bed is usually 
19 
