y than not
they are planted also, in strong masses, with ever so many beautiful
sorts of firmer-stemmed growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody behind,
assembled according to stature, from one to twelve feet high, swinging
in and out around the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is waved
and smiled away.

[Illustration: " ... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's
unreality."

The beauty of this spot could be enhanced in ten minutes by taking away
the planted urns which stand like gazing children in the middle
of the background.]

In that first week of January already mentioned the present writer saw
at every turn, in such borders and in leaf and blossom, the delicate
blue-flowered plumbago; two or three kinds of white jasmine, also in
bloom; and the broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, beginning to
flower. With them were blooming roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus
(not althaea but the _H. rosasinensis_ of our Northern greenhouses), slim
and tall, flaring its mallow-flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red;
the trailing-lantana, covering broad trellises of ten feet in height and
with its drooping masses of delicate foliage turned from green to
mingled hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of their
blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented geraniums of lemon, rose and
nutmeg odors, persisting through the winter unblighted, and the
round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly large of growth--in one case,
on a division fence, trained to the width and height of six feet. There,
too, was the poinsettia still bending in its Christmas red, taller than
the tallest man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the front, but
at times, with truer art, glowing like a red constellation from the
remoter bays of the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen _Magnolia
fuscata_, full of its waxen, cream-tinted, inch-long flowers smelling
delicately like the banana. He found the sweet olive, of refined leaf
and minute axillary flowers yielding their ravishing tonic odor with the
reserve of the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; the
camphor-tree with its neat foliage answering fragrantly the grasp of the
hand. The dark camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-bush,
its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green and its splendid red
flowers covering it from tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a
thousand blossoms open at once and the sod beneath innumerably starred
with others already fallen