158 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[June 13. 
bye such should he carefully extracted the luoment they 
appear. 
Thus cultivated, there will he a stock of lusty young 
plants by the early part of July. And now the cultivator 
must make up his mind as to the course of culture he 
should pursue; hut as the full discussion of the various 
modes, with their reasons, would prove too long for the 
present paper, we must beg to waive it for about a fort¬ 
night or so ; when, if all be well, we will grapple with 
the remainder of the subject in all its known bearings. 
Varieties.— Something may, however, be added about 
kinds; and, for our part, notwithstanding all that has 
been said about new kinds, we feel it a duty to keep the 
eye of the amateur, or the small gardener, fixed on a few 
good old sorts, which have kept their ground against all 
competitors. These are the Keen's Seedling, the British 
Queen, and the Elton. 
Now, it must not for a moment be supposed, that we 
so hedge in the amateur as to dissuade from the culture 
of all others; by no means : let the new kinds, after 
receiving some respectable attestation as to their merits, 
he tried by all means; only let the main reliance for the 
present be placed on those above-named. They form 
an excellent sequence; are most abundant croppers; 
noways delicate or shy; and the Elton, if cultivated in 
a special way, which shall hereafter he described, will 
continue bearing freely until nearly September, when 
Alpines will cany forward until the frost. Thus may 
good strawberries be secured for at least four months; 
all this, however, requires that many persons pursue a 
very different course from their present mode of culture; 
and it shall not be our fault if a decided improvement 
in the growth of this valuable fruit does not take place. 
R. Errington. 
THE ELOWER-GAKDEN. 
Flower-Beds.- —T have said if S. N. V. (see page 133) 
was a planter as well as a designer of flower-beds, I 
should lie glad to assist him to arrange a plan in which 
the present style of flower-gardening might be repre¬ 
sented; and if he was not a planter, that no good coidd 
come of our disputing about the matter; now that his 
plan and planting is before me, I say at once that we 
had better not follow the subject any farther, for I am 
quite certain we cannot agree, and I should be much 
out of my element in disagreeing with any of our cor¬ 
respondents, and more particiflarly with S. N. V. Yet I 
am pushed up into an angle, and escape is impossible, 
and what to do puzzles me. If I give my opinion on 
the shape of his beds, he will be very angry with me; 
and if I pass on and say nothing, he will say 1 have 
been discourteous. Now here is a pretty position for a 
man to get into in this hot weather ! Perhaps, after all, 
the best plan will be to say, good humouredly, that every 
gardener who has written about flower-beds for the last 
15 years has condemned the plan of sharp angles, which 
are sharper in the four corner figures—1, 3, 7, 9—in 
this plan than in any plan that has been before the 
public for that time—as far as I have seen. Well, 
tlion, as all our gardeners agree in condemning sharp 
angles and long narrow points, because they cannot fill 
them as they would, I need not say anything about 
shapes; indeed, I do not put any stress on the shape ot 
a flower-bed farther than that I quite agree witli all the 
gardeners, and conductors of the gardening press, in 
condemning the whole host of stars, diamonds, and all 
other sharp angled figures which designers will push 
into books. My own part, therefore, will lie in the 
planting of them. 
I find six distinct colours in bedding-plants—yellow, 
purple, scarlet, blue, pink, and white; and in each of 
these, again, I find three sizes of plants—very low 
plants, medium sized plants, and tall plants; and I 
want a set of beds in which I can present to the ladies 
the whole of these; and if I do it—even without a 
neutral bed, or, as gardeners call it, “ in bare bones ’ —I 
must have either six beds and three sizes and kinds ot 
plants in each, which is impracticable except in two or 
three instances, or else 18 beds and one land of plant 
in each—that is, a tall white plant in one bed by itself, 
a medium sized in the next, and a low white in the 
third, and so on with the rest. These 18 beds, then, 
are “ the bare hones” of a flower-garden, I care not in 
what style it is planned; and without these 18 beds in 
these degrees a flower-garden of the first class will no 
more represent the simple groundwork of our present 
stock of plants, than a vessel without masts and rigging 
will represent a man-of-war. 
Now these 18 beds may be so planned, 1 suppose, as 
to arrange round a common figure in the style ol 
S. N. V.; (but if so I do not know how to do it, not even 
with the help of half-a-dozen neutral beds. There are 
nine beds in S. N. V.’s plan and five colours only; the 
two verbenas Hendersonii and Charlwoodii are only 
shades of purple, not crimson flowers; the Heliotrope, 
Ouphea, and Silver-edged Geraniums , are neutral beds— 
that is, there is either as much of the colour of the 
leaves as there is of the colour of the flowers, or the 
flowers themselves are not distinct colours; and, to do 
justice to bis planting, two neutral colours should not 
follow each other, as 9 and 0. All variegated plants are 
neutrals, as, if the variation is well marked—as in the 
variegated geraniums—a bed of them will answer any 
where, or in any composition, for a white or white 
flowering plant; and that is the secret why they do so 
beautifully as an edging to a mass of scarlet geraniums. 
Of Silver-edged geraniums I cannot make out which he 
intends, as his planting differs from the usual way ot 
planting thatstyle of garden. These kinds of figures 
are generally planted thus—1 and 9 to he of the same 
colour, and the plants as near as possible of the same 
height; and 3 and 7 the same, hut they are purple and 
yellow ; and 9 must either be lilac, pink or scarlet, 
opposite 1, which is scarlet. There are scarlet varie¬ 
gated geraniums, two lilac ones, a variety of the old 
scarlet variegated, and the oak-leaved variegated, and 
two pink variegated (Mangles s and the Ivy I.eat), 
also one which never flowers, The Bandy, all of them 
beautiful things for beds, but still as neutrals. Then 
bed No. 2 is white, and its opposite, No. 8, purplish, 
or say crimson, quite the reverse of the usual way ; and 
so with 4 and t 6,—a deep blue and a neutral of three 
tints; I cannot make out the principle of this planting. 
The Heliotrope in the centre is excellent, and just as 
it should be; but in so small a garden most people 
would prefer the Silver-edged geranium lor the centre 
bed ; and I would prefer the Ouphea ; but as there is no 
accounting for taste I shall let that pass. Now, as the 
common way of planting is departed from, and that I 
cannot make out the principle of the composition, there 
is no standard within my reach by which to criticise, 
therefore I give it up. 
About twenty years back the late Mr. Loudon began 
to give plans of little flower-gardens of the samo style as 
this, in the Gardeners Magazine; and we have had 
many of them in different works since. Gardeners call 
them by a funny name, Merrymanias, because, as they 
say, you have a fountain, a sun-dial, a vase, or a bed in 
the centre, and on either side duplicate beds, as a clown 
paints his face—patch for patch. But let gardeners say 
what they may, this is the best way to show otl a certain 
number of the best flowering-bedders; but I hold it to 
he quite impossible to show the heights, colours, and 
shades of all the leading families of flower-garden plants 
that way, as it is now attempted to be done in the first- 
rate large gardens. I am only a pupil in the tancy 
myself, I knew very little about it twelve years back, 
