The Garden of Hardy Flowers. 
j 
HIS BOOK is written to show the many advantages of gardening with hardy 
flowers as compared with bedding plants. We have been very careful not 
to make a single exaggerated statement, and every illustration is an actual 
garden picture, and it is worthy of note that it is always the garden of hardy 
flowers, and never the one of bedding plants, that furnishes subjects for the artist’s 
pencil and brush. Hardy flowers have all artistic advantages and all practical ones 
as well. '1 heir first cost being their only cost and their greatly increasing in size and 
beauty year after year makes an investment in them yield an annual dividend of loveliness 
not to be computed in any ordinary way. 
'o TT’ ^ he a * most enl -' re exclusion of the great wealth of hardy plants from American 
V' i\Uy gardens in favor of a few — hardly a score — of tender ones has so impoverished them 
' of all real beauty as to make them a monotonous and — when the enormous amount of 
\ money and effort that is spent upon them is considered — distressing sight. In almost 
every garden are seen the same stereotyped carpet and ribbon beds, mere lines of color, that are as 
unchanging during their season of four months as the patterns of the carpets, and that perish 
entirely with the first frost. The entire labor and expense is renewed the next season, and the 
annual outlay is only limited by one’s willingness or ability to pay. 
We have thought constantly of a garden — caught glimpses of it rarely — where early spring 
is ushered in with myriads of snowdrops, crocuses and violets peeping through the grass, with 
yellow daffodils and scarlet tulips, with rarest blue of scillas, and with odors of hyacinths; and 
later with lilies of the valley, and lilac, and hawthorns, and numerous flowering shrubs. June — 
the month of flowers — finds our garden fairly aglow with floral beauty, roses everywhere, in 
groups, on fences, sprawling on the grass with their wreaths of loveliness, clambering over bushes, 
and here and there covering even the tops of the trees with showers of pink or white bloom. Not 
only roses, but monarch poppies, columbines, early-flowering clematis and irises in a multitude, 
and Easter lilies in all their purity, and the grand rhododendrons, second only to roses, and with 
them, later, the glorious auratum lilies showing stately above their rich greens. 
With this grand June overture to summer our garden follows quickly with a succession of 
lovely and changing scenes — of day lilies, hardy pinks, exquisite Japan irises, and a procession of 
stately lilies, commencing with June, ending only with frost; of poppies, hollyhocks — single and 
double — and clematises with their wreaths and garlands of purples, pinks and whites ; of foxgloves, 
larkspurs and evening primroses; and our garden, daily, until frost, will have new attractions — 
and even with the snows of November will give us hardy white and yellow chrysanthemums, and, 
if the winter be a mild one, perhaps a bunch of pansies at Christmas. 
Arranged with some judgment at first, this garden might be left to take care of itself; time 
would but add to its attractions, and the happy owner might go away for years and find it beautiful 
on his return. 
