House and Garden 
at every stage until the frost comes. The gardeners 
are often Scotch and this leads to rather a simi¬ 
larity of design and it is really only when the 
possessor knows about plants and tries experi¬ 
ments for him or herself that the garden carries 
out the English idea of being beautiful at every 
season. To the English mind, the fact that every¬ 
thing grows with such marvellous rapidity, seems 
a perfect delight until it is discovered that the 
rapidity in growth has the drawback of rapidity of 
maturing, as for instance, a border of Michaelmas 
of nymphaea, from the lovely large Nile lotus to the 
little common wild water-lily, was entirely designed 
by the owner. Every stone and rock in the making 
of this miniature garden was placed in position at 
the owner’s direction. She told me that her great 
difficulty was preventing the rocks from being over¬ 
grown; she was always pulling up and cutting out, 
the luxuriance of growth was so tremendous. This 
lady has a good gardener yet she finds it necessary 
to keep a daily eye on everything; dead branches of 
trees to be lopped off and the wounds cauterized or 
THE WILD GARDEN OF MRS. C. B. ALEXANDER, TUXEDO PARK 
daisies which in England would under ordinary 
climatic conditions remain in perfect beauty for 
three weeks or a month, here, is over in a week. 
This, of course, makes the question of proper succes¬ 
sion much more difficult than in the older country. 
Also, the same rapid growth here makes an her¬ 
baceous border a hard thing to cope with as every¬ 
thing grows so big and it is not easy to keep things 
in flower near the soil; they seem to want to rush 
up to the sun. The most successful gardens as 
as I have said are those in which the owner really 
worked. One was a rock garden with a small 
pond, which, in spite of its tiny size shows a variety 
the fatal damp frost would mean a dead tree in the 
winter. This garden was rather near the sea and 
therefore the plants in it had to be guarded from 
the salt mists. 
Another delightful though not a large garden is 
the joy of a husband and wife. Both work in it with 
their hands, although keeping a staff of gardeners, 
for, as the wife told me, every day during the rapid 
growth of summer, there is much that she can do 
herself. It was on account of their real love for 
their garden, that this small spot was a series of 
pictures all through the summer. I saw it from 
July to the end of October and during all that time 
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