To know how to lay out a garden after the
most approved modern fashion we have but to turn
to the deservedly popular pages of " The English
Flower Garden." This book contains not only model
designs and commended examples from various
existing gardens, but text contributed by some
seventy professional and amateur gardeners. Even
the gardener who has other ideals and larger
ambitions than are here expected, heartily welcomes
a book so well stored with modern garden-lore up to
date, with suggestions for new aspects of vegetation,
new renderings of plant life, and must earnestly
desire to see any system of gardening made perfect
after its kind —

" I wish the sun should shine

On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine."

Gardening is, above all things, a progressive Art
which has never had so fine a time to display its
possibilities as now, if we were only wise enough to
freely employ old experiences and modern opportu-
nities. People are, however, so readily content with
their stereotyped models, with barren imitations,
with their petty list of specimens, when instead of
half-a-dozen kinds of plants, their garden has room
for hundreds of different plants of fine form— hardy
or half-hardy, annual and bulbous— which would
equally well suit the British garden and add to its
wealth of beauty by varied colourings in spring.
128 GARDEN-CRAFT.
summer, and autumn. At present " the choke-
muddle shrubbery, in which the poor flowering
shrubs dwindle and kill each other, generally sup-
ports a few ill-grown and ill-chosen plants, but it
is mainly distinguished for wide patches of bare
earth in summer, over which, in better hands, pretty
green things might crowd." The specimen plant has
no chance of displaying itself under such conditions.
