ed, the plants are divided
and reset, the leavings often serving as a sort of horticultural wampum,
the medium of exchange among neighbours with gardens, or else going as a
freewill offering to found a garden for one of the "plotters" who needs
encouragement.

The limitations of the soil of my garden and surroundings serve as the
basis of an experience that, however, I have found carried out
practically in the same way in the larger gardens of the Bluffs and in
many other places that Evan and I have visited. So that any one thinking
that a hardy garden, at least of herbaceous plants, is a thing that,
once established, will, if not molested, go on forever, after the manner
of the fern banks of the woods or the wild flowers of marsh and meadow,
will be grievously disappointed.

Of course, where hardy plants are massed, as in nurseries, horticultural
gardens, or the large estates, each in a bed or plot of its kind, this
resetting is far simpler, as each variety can receive the culture best
suited to it, and there is no mixing of species.

Another common error in regard to the hardy garden, aided and abetted
by _Garden Goozle_, is that it is easy or even practicable to have every
bed in a blooming and decorative condition during the whole season. It
is perfectly possible always to have colour and fragrance in some part
of the garden during the entire season, after the manner of the natural
sequence of bloom that passes over the land, each bed in bloom some of
the time, but not every bed all of the time. Artifice and not nature
alone can produce this, and artifice is too costly a thing for the woman
who is her own gardener, even if otherwise desirable. For it should
appeal to every one having a grain of garden sense that, if the plants
of May and June are to grow and bloom abundantly, those that come to
perfection in July and August, if planted in their immediate vicinity,
must be overshadowed and dwarfed. The best that can be done is to leave
little gaps or lines between the hardy plants, so that gladioli, or some
of the quick-growing and really worthy annuals, can be introduced to
lend colour to what becomes too severely of the past.

There is one hardy garden, not far from Boston, one of those where the
landscape architect lingers to study the possibilities of the formal
side of his art in skilful adjustment of pillar, urn, pergola, and
basin,--this garden is never out of flower. At many seasons Evan and I
had visited