HINTS ON FLOWER GARDENING. 
159 
public would feel an interest in them, and they would be properly supported ; but so 
long as they are inferior in point of attraction to second or even third-rate private 
establishments, it is preposterous to expect the public to take any interest in them. 
This may appear to be a digression from our subject ; but we make it for the 
purpose of shewing how much we expect from those societies which have gardens, 
and to show how we think they ought to contribute to the progress of cultivation 
and decorative gardening. Suppose the garden of the Horticultural Society of 
London, instead of being what it is in point of design and arrangement, had been 
laid out as it ought to have been, or as some of our leading landscape gardeners 
would lay it out at the present time, with spacious lawns and flower-gardens, 
splendid plant-houses, and a kitchen and fruit-garden replete with every necessary in 
the way of forcing-houses, which the most fastidious could desire, and that every 
department had been kept in the highest possible trim ; would it not have been 
better supported than it has been, and also have been more deserving of support ? 
The same remarks apply to almost every public garden in Great Britain ; they 
are badly supported, not so much from a want of taste on the part of the public, 
as from the fact of the several establishments not offering sufficient attraction to 
interest the public in their proper management. Only imagine the vast influence 
these societies would exert over the public mind if they were managed in first-rate 
style, and were examples of superior cultivation, as from the thousands and tens of 
thousands which visit them annually, the majority of whom may be considered to be 
interested in horticulture, great good must result. 
Now, to proceed with our subject as connected with the principles of flower- 
gardening, the prevailing errors are those of planting flower-gardens without properly 
harmonising or contrasting the colours ; planting tall plants in small beds, and small 
plants in large ones ; neglecting to train or regulate the plants as they progress in 
growth, so as to get the plants in proper and appropriate shapes ; and growing a 
quantity of comparatively worthless plants for sake of a collection, when half the 
quantity of the best kinds would not only suffice, but would be far more effective as a 
general arrangement, and decidedly more interesting to the common observer. For 
example, we cannot see the necessity for cultivating a hundred different varieties of 
Verbenas, when more plants of fifteen or twenty of the best and most distinct kinds 
would answer the purpose better ; neither can we see the necessity of filling fifty beds 
with fifty different plants, when twenty kinds would be equally appropriate, and make 
a far more effective arrangement. No, no ; the whole of our plant collections require 
a severe weeding : at least one-half of the flower-garden plants at present cultivated 
should be thrown to the winds, and have their places filled by less rare but more 
showy plants. We do not wish to see all the inferior plants banished entirely, as 
some of the best of them, though unfit for masses, may be admissible for the mixed 
border, and there will make a fine display. What we want for massing in the 
flower-gardens are plants of close, compact, dense habit, producing abundance of 
bright clear flowers, not by fits and starts as some do, but throughout the season, 
