THE MIXED BORDER 
8 ? 
autumn. I know a garden, rather larger than 
the average cottage garden, where you walk 
quite a long way between neatly clipped box 
edgings before turning off to a tiny garden of 
square beds and brick-paved paths in front of 
the cottage. It belongs to a man who works 
on the railway line, and he and the wife spend 
all their spare time working in their garden. 
Nowhere does one see finer standard roses, 
great heads a yard through, with solid healthy 
blossoms without number. These are planted 
each side of the long path, in borders filled 
with herbaceous plants, and such annuals as 
stocks, asters, and balsams. Behind are well- 
laid -out kitchen -garden plots and fine old 
fruit trees, and you feel that it is the apple of 
someone’s eye. 
It is this quality of love for one’s garden 
that makes it a success ; without it no garden 
can be anything, however many the gardeners, 
and no matter how much money is spent with 
the nurseryman. 
Dean Hole’s story of the wife who cheer- 
fully let her husband take the blanket to keep 
the frost off his pet plants is an illustration of 
the love and self-denial that ofttimes are the 
foundation of the beauty we admire in these 
cottage gardens ; and yet you hear people 
