ation for many years; but if you watch closely, you will find that it
is rarely the original plant that has survived, but a seedling from it
that has sprung up unobserved under the sheltering leaves of its parent.
The old plant grows thick at the juncture of root stock and leaf, the
action of the frost furrows and splits it, water or slugs gain an
entrance, and it disappears, the younger growth taking its place.
Especially true is this also of hollyhocks. The larkspurs have different
roots and more underground vigour, and all tap-rooted herbs hold their
own well, the difficulty being to curb their spreading and undermining
their border companions.

[Illustration: ENGLISH LARKSPUR SEVEN FEET HIGH.]

It is conditions like these that keep the gardener of hardy things ever
on the alert. Beds for annuals or florists' plants are thoroughly dug
and graded each spring, so that the weeds that must be combated are
of new and comparatively shallow growth. The hardy bed, on the contrary,
in certain places must be stirred with a fork only and that with the
greatest care, for, if well-planned, plants of low growth will carpet
the ground between tall standing things, so that in many spots the
fingers, with a small weeding hoe only, are admissible. Thus a blade of
grass here, some chickweed there, the seed ball of a composite dropping
in its aerial flight, and lo! presently weedlings and seedlings are
wrestling together, and you hesitate to deal roughly with one for fear
of injuring the constitution of the other. To go to the other extreme
and keep the hardy garden or border as spick and span clean as a row of
onions or carrots in the vegetable garden, is to do away with the
informality and a certain gracious blending of form and colour that is
one of its greatest charms.

Thus it comes about, with the most successful of hardy mixed borders,
that, at the end of the third season, things will become a little
confused and the relations between certain border-brothers slightly
strained; the central flowers of the clumps of phloxes, etc., grow
small, because the newer growth of the outside circle saps their
vitality.

Personally, I believe in drastic measures and every third or fourth
year, in late September, or else April, according to season and other
contingencies, I have all the plants carefully removed from the beds and
ranged in rows of a kind upon the broad central walk. Then, after the
bed is thoroughly worked, manured, and grad