what occurs in all surrounding vegetation. The year is maturing. The
garden ought to express the feeling of the different months. The failing
leaves and expended plants are therefore to be looked on, to some extent
at least, as the natural order and destiny of a good garden.

These attributes are well exhibited in the vegetable-garden. In the
spring, the vegetable-garden is a model of neatness and precision. The
rows are straight. There are no missing plants. The earth is mellow and
fresh. Weeds are absent. One takes his friends to the garden, and he
makes pictures of it. By late June or early July, the plants have begun
to sprawl and to get out of shape. The bugs have taken some of them. The
rows are no longer trim and precise. The earth is hot and dry. The weeds
are making headway. By August and September, the garden has lost its
early regularity and freshness. The camera is put aside. The visitors
are not taken to it: the gardener prefers to go alone to find the melon
or the tomatoes, and he comes away as soon as he has secured his
product. Now, as a matter of fact, the garden has been going through its
regular seasonal growth. It is natural that it become ragged. It is not
necessary that weeds conquer it; but I suspect that it would be a very
poor garden, and certainly an uninteresting one, if it retained the
dress of childhood at the time when it should develop the
personalities of age.

There are two types of outdoor gardening in which the progress of the
season is not definitely expressed,--in the carpet-bedding kind, and in
the subtropical kind. I hope that my reader will get a clear distinction
in these matters, for it is exceedingly important. The carpet-bedding
gardening is the making of figure-beds in house-leeks and achyranthes
and coleus and sanitalia, and other things that can be grown in compact
masses and possibly sheared to keep them within place and bounds; the