February, 1919 
25 
IN A SOUTHERN GARDEN 
On the Place of Mrs. A. P. Humphrey, Glenview, 
Ky., Marian C. Coffin, Landscape Architect 
A simple trellis encloses the garden. 
At the meeting of the axes lies a 
little pool. Box edges the borders 
W E have come through a grove of 
tall trees to the arbored en¬ 
trance of the garden. Before us is just 
a simple straight walk with long box 
edged flower borders and lattice en¬ 
closure. It is spring and the tulips 
are in bloom, all in the softest shades, 
white, lilac, lavender, heliotrope, pur¬ 
ple. How delicate it is with the tulips 
raising their tinted cups high above 
the new green of the garden. When we 
see it again, it may be, perchance, in 
the heat of the mid-summer. We find 
white and lilac and violet phloxes, 
lilac and white scabiosa, purple and 
white gladiolus, and pure white gal- 
tonias. How cool and refreshing it 
seems. Or we may see it again in the 
autumn with its lilac and purple 
perennial asters, its lavender and 
white stocks, white snapdragons and 
white dahlias. How quiet and refined 
it seems then. And the vines, at first 
merely a thin tracery upon the lattice, 
soon wreaths the wooden framework 
with garlanded decoration. There 
are lathyrus, the climbing pea, and 
roses and clematis. There are Silver 
Moon roses, with soft semi-double 
large white flowers, and the lovely 
blush Gloire de Dijon and the great white 
flowered climbing Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. 
And of the clematis, there are pu^le varieties 
and white ones, not only the familiar autumn 
Clematis paniculata but its choicer relative. 
Clematis Henryi with luxuriant June bloom of 
great star-shaped blossoms. Flowers and 
vines, in their overlapping succession of bloom, 
reiterate in different form each time the lovely 
coloring of lilac and white in the garden path. 
T hat day in the spring when we walked 
between the borders delicately adorned 
with tulips we went on to the very end of the 
path and there entered the spring garden under 
the old walnut trees. It was full of budding 
columbines where just a little while before we 
ELSA REHMAN 
went to see the creeping phloxes and where in 
a few days we will be seeking the bloom of 
irises and the peonies that will begin to open 
their ready buds. After that, when the great 
trees are in full leaf and the garden becomes 
very shady we will find but an intermittent 
bloom, of white lilies, of foxgloves, of white 
asters. 
S ometimes, as upon some day in early 
summer, we will stop midway down the 
path where, at a little round pool, a cross path 
will lead us into the rose garden. It is just a 
tiny place, half hidden away, half lost in its 
enclosing shrubbery, yet how full of flowers 
we find it. Rose Dr. Van Fleet is out, climb¬ 
ing over the arbored seat with its large flowers 
There are three gardens in all—one 
formal and enclosed, an autumn 
garden and a garden for the spring 
and loose habit displayed through 
very contrast amid the small rambler 
type of the other pink climbers. Para¬ 
dise and Evangeline. The pink H. T. 
roses are in bloom and the polyanthas, 
pink and cream ones that grow inter¬ 
mingled as edgings. Then there are 
old fashioned China roses and there 
are moss roses whose spiny clusters 
are full of fragrance and full of mem¬ 
ories of old-time nosegays. And there 
are some bush roses, white Madam 
Pantier and pink Penzance briers. 
other times when we hesitate 
midway along the path our eye 
may catch glimpses of another garden, 
on the other side. Like the rose gar¬ 
den it, too, is half hidden in its tree 
and shrub enclosure, but it is larger 
with an irregularly shaped lawn sur¬ 
rounded by broad borders bright with 
flowers. The oriental poppies may be 
in bloom, pink ones, maroon ones, 
deep blood red ones, or there may be 
great mats of Sweet William, like the 
poppies each variety in separate mass¬ 
es, or there may be larkspurs in flower, 
their great spikes rising out of the 
background all around the garden. 
These effects are just simple preludes to a 
garden at its best in the autumn. It seems 
quiet enough at the entrance with ageratum 
and blue salvia, but look at the border opposite. 
As we cannot see, from the entrance, any^ of 
the flowers that make the transition,—the pink 
phloxes and flesh colored zinnias, the calendu¬ 
las, the yellow and orange dahlias and crimson 
coreopsis,—several octaves in the color scale 
seem to have been leapt at a bound, for across 
the coolest of blues we see scarlet zinnias and 
red dahlias full of richness and warmth. They 
form a brilliant keystone, as it were, for the 
flowers that seem to radiate out from them: for 
tritomas and orange red montbretias, for rich 
red heliochrysum and flame snapdragons, for 
scarlet verbenas and the brightest red phloxes. 
