The easiest way to spoil a good lawn is to put a flower-bed in i and the most effective way in which to show off flowers to tl least advantage is to plant them in a bed in the greensw Flowers need a background. We do not hang our picture fence-posts. If flowers are to be grown on a lawn, let them the hardy kind, which can be naturalized in the sod and grow freely in the tall unmown grass; or else perennials of nature that they make attractive clumps by themselves. I should be free and generous, but the more they are cut u worried with trivial effects, the smaller and meaner they 1

19. Hole-in-the-ground gardening.

But even if we consider these lawn flower-beds wholly from their surroundings, we must admit that they are i unsatisfactory. It generally amounts to this, that we have four months of sparse and downcast vegetation, one month of limp and frost-bitten plants, and seven months of bare earth (Fig. 19). I am not now opposing the carpet-beds which professional gardeners make in parks and other museums. I like museums, and some of the carpet-beds and set pieces are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (see Fig. 20). I am directing my remarks to those humble home-made flower-beds that are so common in lawns of country and city homes alike. These beds are cut from the good fresh turf, often in the most fantastic designs, and are filled with such plants as the women of the place may be able to carry over in cellars or in the window. The plants themselves may look very well in pots, but when they are turned out of doors, they have a sorry time for a month adapting themselves to the sun and winds, and it is generally well on towards midsummer before they begin to cover the earth.

During all these weeks they have demanded more time and labor than would have been needed to care for a plantation of much greater size and which would have given flowers every day from the time the birds began to nest in the spring until the last robin had flown in November.

20. Worth paying admittance price towel.