Manual of Gardening

at their best and are most luxuriant when overtaken by the fall frosts.

Now, the home gardener usually relies on plants that more or less come
and go with the seasons. He pieces out and extends the season, to be
sure; but a garden with pansies, pinks, sweet william, roses, sweet
peas, petunias, marigolds, salpiglossis, sweet sultan, poppies, zinnias,
asters, cosmos, and the rest, is a progress-of-the-season garden,
nevertheless; and if it is a garden of herbaceous perennials, it still
more completely expresses the time-of-year.

My reader will now consider, perhaps, whether he would have his garden

accent and heighten his natural year from spring to fall, or whether he
desires to thrust into his year a feeling of another order of
vegetation. Either is allowable; but the gardener should distinguish at
the outset.

I wish to suggest to my reader, also, that it is possible for the garden
to retain some interest even in the winter months. I sometimes question
whether it is altogether wise to clear out the old garden stems too
completely and too smoothly in the fall, and thereby obliterate every
mark of it for the winter months; but however this may be, there are two
ways by which the garden year may be extended: by planting things that
bloom very late in fall and others that bloom very early in spring; by
using freely, in the backgrounds, of bushes and trees that have
interesting winter characters.

* * * * *

One cannot expect satisfaction in the planting and developing of a home
area unless he has a clear conception of what is to be done. This
necessarily follows, since the pleasure that one derives from any

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