Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/704

1096 square on your plan as soon as it is planted. An inclosure of eighteen-inch chicken wire whereon sweet-peas might climb would be very nice— or you might make a little hedge of common mint. This can be kept trimmed or not, as you choose. There were ten kinds of perennials suggested for raising in the seed-bed. These ten kinds are distributed around this little garden plan so that the very best results, in color combination and general habit and size of the plants, will be realized.

I think I have said something before about not making flower beds out in the middle of the lawn. Try and learn to think of flowers as a very wonderful kind of outdoor trimming—a jeweled trimming, indeed, or a precious embroidery, or a priceless lace. Such ornament is never dropped into the middle of a breadth of some splendid material, but is always used to embellish its edges, to finish them and enrich them or else a great mass of it is spread entirely over such material, covering it almost completely. Can you not see how this will work out in planting your flowers? How they will go into borders around the lawn, or else will be put into beds that really cover it and turn it into a little flower garden? A flower bed is truly a part of a garden, never a part of a lawn. If you have no place along which a border may run, therefore, plan a real little garden, and have several beds grouped together as the plan shows, rather than a single round one, or one shaped like a star or a half-moon.

Prepare the ground in the new garden just the same as you did that for the border of annuals early in the season, breaking it up fine and making it mellow by working it over and raking out all the stones and coarse stuff. Transplant the plants from the seed-bed very carefully, and water them and look after them just as you did the others. Of course they will go on growing for several weeks before cold weather brings their “vacation”; but they will still be not much more than babies, although they may be of fairly good size, when winter finally does come. Of course you will remember that no flowers are to be expected from them until another summer.

Blanketing the ground over these is necessary to keep them in it at all, for once let Jack Frost so much as peep out after he has worked his way in among the tender rootlets that are as yet only feebly grasping the soil particles, and he will somehow work them out along with himself, unplanting them altogether.