In an admirable essay before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society recently, Mr. E. L. Beard says: "What is needed in the place of bedding plants is diversity of form and color and artistic combinations. Let us mark each season with its flowers and enjoy them in their order, and the development of our interest and pleasure will become more full and gratifying with each successive year. Our attention will be diverted to new pleasures, before unknown or unappreciated, for the realm of horticultural investigation has no limits. A well-known writer, summing up the contrast between bedding and hardy plants, says there is nothing whatever used in bedding to be compared in any way - color, fragrance or bloom - to that found in many families of hardy plants. There is no beauty at all among bedding plants, comparable with that of lilies, irises, paeonies, delphiniums, narcissi, and a host of others. Are we to put aside all this beauty or put it into a second place, for the sake of the comparatively few things that merely make beds and lines of colors for two or three months, and from which you cannot cut a nosegay ? Let those who like bedding plants enjoy them; but no one who knows what the plants of the northern and temperate world are can admit that their place is a secondary one.

We might also argue from an aesthetic standpoint against the artificially of bedding out, and its violation of artistic ideas, independent of its practical disadvantages; but as we have to deal with practice rather than theory, it is better to attempt to show how many beautiful, and to most people unfamiliar, plants can be used to decorate our gardens and grounds, many of which are barren wastes compared with what a little knowledge and taste might make them. The essayist therefore turned from any arguments, for or against favorite plants, to consider how our gardens may be made beautiful by the culture of hardy plants".