48 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
monly regarded as bordered “beds,” which our fancy 
associates with old-time gardens, were always filled 
with flowers. This is not true. Some may have 
been, but the great gardeners and writers upon garden¬ 
ing of the age, are careful to express their condemna¬ 
tion of such treatment. Flowers were put into bor¬ 
ders along the walks and against the hedge, or into 
what they called “open knots.” These were of fanci¬ 
ful form similar to the bordered knots, perhaps just 
like them; but were without inclosure of any kind— 
open, and therefore better suited to flowers; what we 
to-day would call a bed. Boxwood borders, or bor¬ 
ders of thyme or rosemary or hyssop or thrift—all 
these were used in planting the intricate bordered 
knots and designs—left no room with their convolu¬ 
tions and often very narrow complexities, for flowers. 
And moreover, such designs needed no flowers; they 
were expressions of form and line alone; flowers fur¬ 
nished quite another motif, to be used in another 
place. 
Boxwood was highest in favor for a border to the 
simplest knots—that is, those whose design was not 
too intricate for its sturdiness. “French or Dutch 
box” Parkinson calls it, recommending it because it 
does not overgrow the beds and spoil their form, “as 
thrift, germander, marjerome, Savorie,” do. Laven¬ 
der cotton was used also; and here again Josselyn’s 
