. The front porch is
garlanded--not smothered--with vines whose flowers are all white, pink,
blue or light purple. About the base of the porch and of all the house's
front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest
the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the
beds--gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness--are thickly
bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor
a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark
foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the dwelling. But
there at once he finds the second phase in a crescendo of floral
colors. The base of the house, and especially those empty eye-sockets,
the cellar windows, are veiled in exultant bloom, yellows predominating.
Then at the back of the place comes the full chorus, and red flowers
overmaster the yellow, though the delicate tints with which the scheme
began are still present to preserve the dignity and suavity of all--the
ladies of the feast. The paths are only one or two and they never turn
abruptly and ask you to keep off their corners; they have none. Neither
have the flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the hard turnings of
the house with the grace of a rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the
lawn nothing breaks the smooth green but a well-situated tree or two
until the limits of the premises are reached, and there, in lines that
widen and narrow and widen again and hide the surveyor's angles, the
flowers rise once more in a final burst of innumerable blossoms and
splendid hues--a kind of sunset of the garden's own.

When this place, five seasons ago, first entered the competition, it
could hardly be called a garden at all. Yet it was already superior to
many rivals. In those days it seemed to us as though scarcely one of our
working people in a hundred knew that a garden was anything more than a
bed of flowers set down anywhere and anyhow. It was a common experience
for us to be led by an unkept path and through a patch of weeds or
across an ungrassed dooryard full of rubbish, in order to reach a
so-called garden which had never spoken a civil word to the house nor
got one from it. Now, the understanding is that every part of the
premises, every outdoor thing on the premises--path, fence, truck-patch,
stable, stable-yard, hen-yard, tennis or croquet-court--everything is
either a part of the garden or is so reasonably related to it that from