38 
House & Garden 
THE BOLD COLORS OF AN AUTUMN GARDEN 
In This Last Season Nature Seems to Outstrip Herself in Richness 
of Tone and Abundance of Bloom 
T HE autumn garden is luxuriant, abun¬ 
dant as a rich harvest. It is a garden 
of renewed vigor as if it delighted in 
the cool weather. It is a garden exerting itself 
for one last grand display before the cold 
weather cuts it down. 
The autumn garden is full of flowers, an 
all-over tapestry effect, for the showing of bare 
earth which in the springtime is full of promise 
only spells failure in the autumn. The 
watchword of the autumn is fulfillment for 
months of work and waiting. 
The autumn garden is rich with flowers, for 
the pastel-made garden of the spring, where 
the color is laid on ever so lightly, has been 
covered over with the color of the autumn, 
which is laid on thickly and heavily as with 
bold brush strokes. 
The autumn garden has two contrasting 
moods. The one is soft and hazy, like the 
early morning mists, with flowers like ageratum 
and the returning bloom of nepeta, scabiosa 
and lavender stock, lavender and purple 
asters, blue spirea and Salvia farinaceoe and 
blue eupatorium and buddleias. The other 
mood is rich like the autumn foliage and 
colorful as a sunset. It is gay with calendulas 
and marigolds, rich with varicolored zinnias, 
hot with flame-colored phlox and tritomas, 
gaudy with cannas, glorious with scarlet dah¬ 
lias and burnished with all the various dahlias 
that are yellow and apricot, buff and fawn, 
amber and salmon, old gold and copper and 
bronze. It is in the assemblage of these color¬ 
ful flowers that the autumn garden reaches its 
finest fulfillment. 
T HERE are two kinds of flowers in the 
autumn garden: those that are really 
autumn flowers and those summer flow¬ 
ers that linger on lovingly well into the fall. 
The heliotrope that has been blooming modestly 
all summer has become careless and wide¬ 
spread and blooms with abandon in the au¬ 
tumn. The giant zinnia that has been well- 
behaved throws out great far-reaching arms in 
the autumn. The few scabiosas and annual 
larkspurs, even the stray Delphinium bella¬ 
donna that has lingered on well into September, 
add just the right touch of delicacy to the au¬ 
tumn flowers. And I have seen phlox Mrs. 
Jenkins raising great white trusses among the 
large flowered White Queen asters as late as 
the first of October, and on the same day phlox 
Antonin Mercie was building up the inter¬ 
mediate color tier between heliotrope and 
buddleias still full of vigor. 
It is hard to tell, indeed, whether to consider 
such flowers as dahlias as summer or autumn 
flowers when those that are slightly forced 
bloom by the fourth of July and those that are 
planted late come into bloom in September. 
The same may be said of many annuals. I 
know one gardener who has his annuals bloom- 
ELSA REHMANN 
ing early in July. Then when his people go 
away for the midsummer he actually cuts his 
annual garden down to 6", and behold by Sep¬ 
tember it is in the fullest vigor again. But 
there are many annuals, too, that go on bloom¬ 
ing happily all summer and well into the fall— 
annuals like marigolds and zinnias and calen¬ 
dulas. In fact, I have seen calendulas still 
in bloom in December. 
A great many of the autumn flowers really 
begin to bloom about the middle of August— 
such flowers as the rose-colored sedums, Lilium 
speciosum and New England asters, and all the 
great sneezeweeds and sunflowers, the helen- 
iums and helianthus, respectively. I like hel- 
enium Riverton Gem the best, for its reddish 
bronze flowers have a real autumnal tone. And 
among the sunflowers, the annual Stella with 
its pale flowers seems most charming to me. 
I saw it once used with calendulas and African 
marigolds in cream and orange shades. It was 
used very sparingly—two or three plants per¬ 
haps in the great mass of the other flowers, as 
if they were some very choice variety. Gener¬ 
ally these groups like full sway over the garden 
in their season. They are luxuriant to the 
point of becoming a nuisance, but it is this 
very quality that makes them so wonderfully 
effective in great borders. 
O NE of the real autumn flowers is the 
blue spirea, a delicate plant easily win¬ 
ter-killed but altogether soft and lovely. 
The lavender-blue eupatorium is a sturdier 
plant but with a charming hazy quality to its 
flowers. Among light blue flowers there is the 
perennial blue salvia, Salvia azurea, that looks 
well with tall white phlox and boltonias and 
is particularly happy when its charming annual 
relative, Salvia farinacece, in hazy blue and 
silvery white, makes a foreground for it. The 
autumn cimicifugas or white snakeroots are 
comparatively rare plants. Like their summer 
relative, Cimicifuga racemosa, they like the 
deep shade amid ferns and look particularly 
well placed against gray stone walls. A Clema¬ 
tis paniculata may, perchance, have trailed 
over the wall and be adorned with its feathery 
fruit. Clematis paniculata is one of the few 
autumn blooming vines. The great polygonum 
with its white film may still be out, and the 
annual cobea may have a few flower trumpets 
left, but for an autumn show the clematis is 
all-satisfying. As for other vines, there are 
orange-berried bittersweet and matrimony vine 
with lavender berries; there are Vitis Henryi 
with turquoise fruit and honeysuckle with 
shiny black berries, and there are the coloring 
Virginia creepers that are particularly fine as 
a background for anemones. 
Japanese anemones—the white anemones 
with a chastity quite unrivaled and the pink 
ones with a soft femininity altogether lovely— 
are, perhaps, the most precious flowers of the 
autumn. They have a delicacy altogether 
spring-like. They are so choice that the com¬ 
panionship of only the most delicate plants 
seems appropriate. For this reason they look 
well with Lilium speciosum and with snap¬ 
dragons. 
Anemones like cool, half-shaded places. 
They like to stretch their white bloom the whole 
way under an arbor. I like to see the white 
anemone amid ferns, and I have planted the 
pink Queen Charlotte among the laurels in a 
semi-shady garden on the edge of a woods try¬ 
ing to bring the wondrous pink of the laurels 
back to the autumn garden. 
T HE most prominent autumn flowers are 
the asters. They are the finest of all 
the autumn rayed flowers and have a 
range of soft shades. There are white asters 
and pink ones, but the finest are the blue and 
lavender ones. I like the shy white and modest 
pale blue asters of the woods. Nature has a 
delicate way of handling her wood asters, for 
she scatters them ever so lightly as if they were 
especially precious. It is in this same spirit 
that I have seen asters planted in semi-shady 
gardens intermingled with the delicate foliage 
of columbines and meadow rues. This more 
delicate handling is charming, too, in the 
mixed border where the aster plants are to be 
found in clusters interspersed amid spring and 
summer flowers. Such asters as Climax make 
fascinating high points when planted in clus¬ 
ters of five to seven plants at either end of a 
border otherwise low and flat. And such asters 
as ericoides with lovely mounds of feathery 
bloom quite in the spirit of Baby’s Breath, can 
be used like it spotted singly through the border. 
But with some of her wild asters Nature is 
more lavish, for you often see the New En¬ 
gland aster, for instance, displaying itself in 
great masses through the fields. In this glo¬ 
rious display of asters many autumn gardens 
show their finest spirit. Planted in rows 2' or 
3' apart in order that each plant may become 
full and well-formed, they rival the hot-house 
cinerarias. I once saw the New England aster, 
Climax, White Queen and the rose pink St. 
Egwin used together in this way with great 
effect. The New England is the tallest of this 
group and the most straggly. Climax is a 
more orderly plant with splendid dark green 
foliage. White Queen is the best tall white 
variety, while St. Egwin is quite different, a 
very compact plant not over 3' high with dark 
gray-green foliage. This diversity in height 
and character intensifies the beauty of the 
border. 
T 
HIS border was as near a rival as I 
have seen to the picture of the Michael¬ 
mas Daisies in Miss Jekyll’s “Color in 
Flower Garden”. Miss Jekyll seems a 
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