House & Garden 
ABOVE THE LILY POOLS 
ONE OF THE OAK TREES 
their new surroundings. The old slab of the 
balcony had legs put under it, and thus made 
a good seat. A curved path joined the two 
flights to the long walk, and a semicircular 
fern bed, with privet trees clipped as spheres, 
finished this part of the garden. 
Though we cared much for the design of 
the garden, we cared even more for the 
things that grew in it, so that the space 
allotted to flowers, some thirty feet square, 
soon proved quite too small for the many 
plants that we wanted to have growing near 
us. At the top of the slope and to the 
west of the exedra a space was enclosed for 
a reserve garden, where we might grow 
flowers for cutting. To the eastward of the 
exedra a great bed of rather irregular form 
was dug, of which the part at the top of the 
hill was open to bright sunlight while the 
rest of it, near the cedar trees, offered such 
shade as lilies and many other things require. 
This bed is a genuine “mixed border.” Its 
glory in April is the mat-like Phlox subulata 
—white and pink ; in May the stately garden 
tulip, Gesneriana; in June a great patch of 
old-fashioned orange lilies, with sometimes 
as many as fifteen hundred flowers in a single 
season; in July it is gay with Lythrum ; 
in August the flame-like flowers of the 
butterfly-weed outshine all else; September 
crowns with yellow the stately clumps of 
Helianthus rigidus ; in October innumerable 
asters are still in bloom ; and in November 
many kinds of hardy chrysanthemums make 
the great bed the Mecca of our garden 
pilgrimages. 
In spite of all that we had done, the gar¬ 
den had an air of incompleteness. The 
long path, the very foundation of the 
scheme, had failed to reach its goal. Then, 
too, we had no place for water-plants. So, 
after awhile, we set out to remedy both de¬ 
fects at a stroke. A hedge of tall Arbor-vit<e 
was put about the cedar tree, the more defi¬ 
nitely to end the vista down the path. Not 
wishing to be at the expense of building a 
lily pond, a pair of disused casks, of heavy 
oak strongly bound with iron hoops, were 
bought at a brewery. When sawn in half, 
these casks made four admirable tubs, each 
eight feet across and three feet deep. Sunk 
in the ground, with the grass coming up to 
their rims, nothing could better suit the pur¬ 
pose. The overflow of the central fountain 
J 35 
