A well-ordered garden is not merely a picture of gay colors but an atmosphere as well, the result always of combining practical ideas with the esthetic 
Effi 
icienc 
V -; y i 
lower fjarden 
APPLYING PRACTICAL LAWS TO FLOWER GROWING—THE CHOICE OF GARDEN SITES— 
SOILS AND DRAINAGE 
F. F. Rockwell 
Editor's Note.—Have you used the same up-to-date methods in managing your flower gardens as you have in growing your vegetables and fruits!’ Do you realise that the 
fact that flowers are grown for beauty rather than for utility does not save them from coming under the same practical laws of plant-nutrition and growth? This is the first 
of a series of articles on efficiency in the flower garden which will pay particular attention to the practical, essential things which are so often overlooked. If you will take 
the trouble to follow them, we think your flower !gard : ens Will show a marked improvement. 
O NE does not usually think of dowers and dower gardens in 
terms of efficiency. Perhaps we even feel an instinctive 
hostility to such an association of ideas. But is there, after all, 
any incongruity about it? The aim and purpose of a garden, it 
is true, is the creation of a spirit of beauty — a product too in¬ 
tangible to be measured by the stop-watch and scales of the effi¬ 
ciency engineer. But the materials upon which the garden artist- 
must draw to create his picture, whether he be the greenest of 
amateurs or the skilled professional, are plants, subject to laws of 
growth which we have fairly well ascertained, and which apply 
no less surely to the bed of dew-bejeweled roses than to the hum¬ 
blest row of beans. And there are, furthermore, some general 
principles in the use of these materials which are not mere ques¬ 
tions of taste. 
It is, however, next to useless to speak of efficiency in dower 
gardening before having clearly dxed in mind just what a garden 
is. It is more than the dowers and shrubs and bulbs and beds 
and borders which go to make it up. These things form its 
physical being, it is true. But a path may be more important than 
a costly planting of roses; a bit of graceful columbine against a 
gary wall may express more than hundreds of dollars’ worth of 
rare plants carefully watched and tended. No real garden can be 
measured by its size or the kinds or numbers of things in it. It 
104 
