I 
THE GARDEN 
25 
small formal one, and had been the children’s 
garden even before she enjoyed it. The old 
damask roses standing there now must have 
grown in that same sunny corner for nearly a 
hundred years. The gardens laid out by 
Queen Victoria for the king and the princes 
and princesses at Osborne were small formal 
ones. A part of each was devoted to flowers, 
the remainder to fruit and vegetables. The 
ground was divided into nine plots, each bear¬ 
ing the name of its owner from the Princess 
Royal to Princess Beatrice; and these were 
made up of fourteen straight little beds—four 
for vegetables and asparagus, while raspberries, 
currants, gooseberries, and strawberries each 
had two assigned to them, and two were 
devoted to flowers. Hard by the garden a 
thatched shed gave shelter to all the tools 
required to keep them in order, each little 
wheelbarrow having the name of the prince or 
princess to which it belonged painted on it. 
These gardens are still, by his Majesty’s orders, 
kept neat and tidy, and the tools carefully 
preserved. 
The next alternative in planning a garden is 
to make a quite “ wild ” or irregular one. The 
way to do this is not to have any exact formal 
design, but to make use of the natural lie of the 
ground, and plant the flowers accordingly. This 
