Flower Gardening

he kind of garden that you ought to have is the one that is best in the circumstances. In the first place, as has already been said, it should bear a relationship to the house. This does not mean that a house wholly impossible, or only halfway bad, ought to have those qualities duplicated in the garden; nothing could be more senseless than that. It does mean that there should be a certain harmony, if not actual correspondence, of character. True, there might easily be the sort of planning that would so isolate the garden as to shut it out completely from any picture of the house. This would satisfy the passerby, and your neighbor; but how about you? Do you not want to feel that there is a certain homogeneity of atmosphere? Well, you ought to if you do not. Ifthe house is not right architecturally, strive to conceal its defects by beginning the garden there, so to speak. Sometimes a single vine or a few shrubs or evergreens will chasten architecture wonderfully, and at the same time serve to bridge the house with the garden. An Italian villa would better have an Italian garden, a Georgian house a formal design of the English type, a rambling farmhouse an old-fashioned layout of no set form, a house built on rocky ground a rock garden, and so on. This is speaking broadly; in actual practice, so far as the average place of moderate size is concerned, the idea is not so much a garden that is technically accurate for its class as one that in its lines, or some disti...