130 
House & 
Comfort? All that you wish. Soft¬ 
ly resilient cushions. Comfortably 
upholstered backs. Coverings of 
your own choice, of bright cre¬ 
tonne or damask or perhaps tap¬ 
estry or velour. With pillows in 
contrasting colors placed just 
right for relaxation. Doesn’t that 
mean comfort? 
E 
BED D A V 
P O JITS' 
A Happy Choice of 
Furniture 
Add to this comfort the great con¬ 
venience of a full size bed ab¬ 
solutely concealed beneath the 
davenport seat, and easily opened, 
and you have another bedroom 
ready always for over-night guests 
or family emergencies. This is a 
happy choice of sun parlor or 
living room furniture. 
Northfield designs are all wonder¬ 
fully attractive. Some dealer near 
you has them in overstuffed cane- 
back period and fibre patterns. 
And you may feel assured that 
each design is in good style, taste¬ 
To be sure you are get¬ 
ting a Northfield, ask to 
see the Northfield trade 
mark. 
fully covered. Northfield designs 
are all the authoritative work of 
master designers, carefully carried 
out. 
“The Davenport With a 
Secret” is a booklet de¬ 
scribing and illustrating 
many Northfield suites. 
May we send you a copy, 
together with the name of 
a Northfield dealer near 
you? 
THE NORTHFIELD COMPANY 
Makers of Good Furniture 
SHEBOYGAN, WISCONSIN 
18th Street at Martin Avenue 
The Colorful Annuals 
[Continued from page 128 ) 
Garden 
like the old type but with a difference, 
with a nicer rhythm of line, a subtler 
feeling for color, a finer appreciation in 
the selection of the flowers. The old 
bedding plant was used in a mass of 
one solid color, the new is more apt to 
be several shades intermingled into a 
scintillating effect. And even where the 
solid color is used, it seems different be¬ 
cause scattered plants giving a different 
effect from those laid out by rule and 
measure are in nice association with 
mixed herbaceous borders. 
BEDDING PLANTS 
The older form of bedding-out plant 
was really the tender plant that was 
put out-of-doors for the summer, such 
plants as geranium and salvia, cannas 
and begonias. I have always had a par¬ 
ticular dislike for these plants in the 
garden yet the longer I work with 
plants the more true I find that it is 
not an aversion for the plant itself but 
for the improper use to which it is 
put. However, it is not of these plants 
that I think when I speak of bedders. 
I am thinking of such plants as snap¬ 
dragons and stocks, heliotrope and ver¬ 
benas, ageratum and lobelias and 
petunias. 
I am especially fond of verbenas for 
bedding effects. Their trailing habit 
makes them especially useful for cover¬ 
ing over beds of bulbs. I have used 
them that way over daffodil beds, lav- 
endar and purple and white verbenas 
all intermingled in a broad band, some 
6' wide, where the daffodils had been. 
Through surrounding beds there are 
heliotropes sprinkled ever so lightly with 
a foreground of violas and pachysandra 
and a background of laurels and here 
and there a buddleia is planted to con¬ 
tinue the soft toned scheme. This com¬ 
bination of lavendar and purple and 
white—with the predominance of laven¬ 
dar of what the catalogues call blue 
shades—has been a great favorite with 
me until I tried a freer combination last 
year in another garden adding shell pink 
and stronger pink to the scheme. The 
verbenas filled the centre beds of the 
garden, with yellow polyantha roses 
spotted here and there through the beds 
and along the edges intermingled pinks 
and forget-me-nots. 
Lobelias make very good bedders and 
their intense blue is valuable for some 
uses. I like ageratum as a bedder. I 
like the tall variety best, it is a freer 
bloomer and has a freer habit than the 
smaller growing compact flowered vari¬ 
ety. Precise people do not like this 
taller variety because it seems a bit 
frousy to them. Its very unkemptness 
is part of its charm to me. The dwarfer 
variety seems a bit too stiff. 
Verbenas and ageratum and lobelias 
adapt themselves to other uses. I like 
to plant verbenas here and there along 
the edge of an herbaceous border inter¬ 
mingled with other plants of a like 
trailing habit, plants like forget-me-nots 
and funica saxifraga and the early 
creeping veronicas. I have used lobelias 
interplanted with white pinks with in¬ 
teresting effects. Ageratum I like best 
with nepeta mussini and veronica in- 
cana and other gray toned edgings. 
Petunias make excellent bedders. I 
think the reason they are so effective 
in solid masses is because their silky 
translucent texture seems to catch the 
light and reflect it. There are some deep 
violet petunias in a porch box near my 
home that in the late afternoon when 
the light shines horizontally through 
them are the most charming deep wine 
color. There is a beautiful purple one 
now on the market—a real purple with¬ 
out any of the reddish glow—and a 
dwarf variety of the same called vio- 
lacea compacta which ought to prom¬ 
ise interesting edging effects. I have 
seen white petunias in a solid bed 
around a pool in a half shady garden 
that were the very epitome of delicacy. 
I am waiting for the right place and 
the right client to make a garden of 
mixed petunias as I saw them once in 
a flower painting. The colors were all 
lusciously rich and kind of mellow, the 
effect tantalizingly chic. I know I shall 
have to wait until I can plan a very 
small ultra formal garden for a client 
of ultra modern ideas. 
I like the association of annuals and 
perennials in a garden and it is in this 
use that most of us will make the best 
use of them. Creamy-yellow snap¬ 
dragons with purple veronicas, orange 
marigolds with helenium Riverton Gem, 
steel blue salvias against red dahlias, 
carmine zinnias with New England 
asters, French marigolds with chrysan¬ 
themums of the same bronzy tone are 
only a mere suggestion of the color 
possibilities of annual and perennial 
association. The combination of annual 
phlox with perennial ought to be full 
of colorful possibilities, of annual lark¬ 
spur with delphinium belladonna full of 
much delicacy, of annual asters with 
perennial asters full of charming soft¬ 
ness. I like pink snapdragons and pink 
anemones and pink gladiolus together 
and you can emphasize the charm of 
the flower forms by delicately intermin¬ 
gling them. I like, on the other hand, 
calendulas and marigolds and sunflower 
Stella with all the hardier rayed flowers 
of the late summer and the autumn, 
with heleniums and sunflowers and 
boltonias and like to plant them in 
heavy bands and drifts and masses to 
accentuate their sturdiness. 
FLOWER PICTURES 
The more you work with flowers in 
the garden the less you will plant them 
for their own sakes alone but for the 
effects you can attain with them. Take 
fluffy scabiosa upon weak bending 
stems, slender spikes of gladiolus prim- 
ulinus, annual stock-flowered larkspurs 
with lace-like foliage, salpiglossis with 
silky texture and exquisite traceries. 
These are all very delicate flowers and 
require a gracious interplay—flowers 
sprinkled lightly through the border 
and airily intermingled—to bring out 
the delicacy of their modeling and of 
their color. On the other hand, zinnias 
with their sturdier flower habit look 
well when they are planted in solid 
blocks and masses, yellow, orange, red 
zinnias, one color block next the other, 
can be very effective. And, yet, you 
cannot lay down any fixed rules about 
flowers for they adapt themselves so 
easily to varied circumstance. Even 
zinnias are surprising in this respect. It 
is possible to make them look quite 
delicate by spotting them at several 
foot intervals amid lower' plants. I 
used yellow zinnias that way once in 
among a kind of bedding effect of cal¬ 
endulas that were various yellow and 
cream and mixed tones all intermingled. 
These were the so-called dwarf single 
zinnias. I find they adapt themselves 
best to my uses. The giant double zin¬ 
nias with their great flowers and stri- 
dant growth is a bit too valiant for 
most gardens. 
All these effects depend upon one’s 
feeling for plants and their assembling. 
It presupposes a knowledge of plant 
forms and habits and color. 
Assembling annuals for color effects 
is fascinating. I often like one-toned 
effects. I saw a charming effect once 
with white zinnias, white scabiosa and 
white annual phlox and the reason for 
[Continued on page 132 ) 
