ced, must stay where they are; but it is
shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look
upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper
looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. Except
buildings, pavements and great trees--and not always excepting the
trees--we should regard nothing in it as permanent architecture but
only as furnishment and decoration. At favorable moments you will make
whatever rearrangement may seem to you good. A shrub's mere being in a
certain place is no final reason that it should stay there; a shrub or a
dozen shrubs--next spring or fall you may transplant them. A shrub, or
even a tree, may belong where it is this season, and the next and the
next; and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive growth, of
the more desired growth of something else, or of some rearrangement of
other things, that spot may be no longer the best place for it.

Very few shrubs are injured by careful and seasonable, even though
repeated, transplanting. Many are benefited by one or another effect of
the process: by the root pruning they get, by the "division," by the
change of soil, by change of exposure or even by backset in growth.
Transplanting is part of a garden's good discipline. It is almost as
necessary to the best results as pruning--on which grave subject there
is no room to speak here. The owner even of an American garden should
rule his garden, not be ruled by it. Yet he should rule without
oppression, and it will not be truly American if it fails to show at a
glance that it is not overgardened.

Thus do we propose to exhort our next season's competitors as this fall
and winter they gather at our projected indoor garden-talks, or as we go
among them to offer counsel concerning their grounds plans for next
spring. And we hope not to omit to say, as we had almost omitted to say
here, in behalf of the kind of garden we preach, that shrubs, the most
of them, require no great enrichment of the soil--an important
consideration. And we shall take much care to recommend the perusal of
books on gardening. Once this gentle art was largely kept a close secret
of craftsmen; but now all that can be put into books is in books, and
the books are non-technical, brief and inexpensive; or if voluminous and
costly, as some of the best needs must be, are in the public libraries.
In their pages are a host of facts (indexed!) which once had to be
burdensomely remem