true gardener knows that the perfect garden is a momentary thing 
that your eyes must be ready to see and your heart to understand. 
Not flowers, nor care, nor setting, nor sunshine, nor shadow will 
make this moment of perfection. It just happens, and if you are 
troubled by small imperfections you will miss it altogether. 
Make a New Year's resolve and renew it with the first green blade 
of Spring; to miss no beauty that your garden has to show, and to 
share that beauty with all who care to see. 
K. L. B. 
A Garden of Spring Flowers 
Gertrude Jekyll — V. M. E. 
If a garden for the flowers of the earher months is to be given all 
that it deserves it should be in a place of its own, apart from the 
spaces devoted to the flowers of summer and the later year. It can- 
not everywhere be so arranged, for often the only chance for the 
spring flowers is to have them in beds or borders that will be filled 
later with summer blooming plants. Where this is so it is inevitable 
that the planting, however well arranged, will have the temporary 
"bedding" appearance that is out of harmony with those sentiments 
of repose and continuity that are such valuable qualities in all good 
gardening; also the scope in the choice of plants will be necessarily 
restricted. But in the spring garden, that need not be disturbed, 
there is not only a much wider range of material to choose from, but 
there may be bold groups of some of those permanent plants of large 
and handsome form that have a conspicuous air of importance and 
distinction. These are the more to be valued because the large-leaved 
garden plants of springtime are none too many. 
As it has been one of my pleasant tasks of late years to puzzle out 
ways of using spring flowers it may be of use to say something of my 
own garden, especially as it showed itself in those happier years before 
the war; and to note certain conclusions I have come to since; for 
though for three years it has been almost neglected, yet one never 
ceases to think out ways and means, in the hope that some day it may 
again be given the attention it deserves. 
The spring garden lies a little way apart and yet is easily accessible. 
There is a long, high wall that was built for the protection of the main 
summer flower border from the northwest wind. The spring garden 
lies at the back of this at one end and on its northern side, where the 
line of the wall is prolonged by a Yew hedge which has now grown to 
equal the ten-foot height of the wall itself. The hedge returns at the 
