with its wonderful "design," set out into a wood or in a free and open
landscape! Even the birds would laugh at it!

What I want to say is that we should grow flowers freely when we make a
flower-garden. We should have enough of them to make the effort worth
the while. I sympathize with the man who likes sunflowers. There are
enough of them to be worth looking at. They fill the eye. Now show this
man ten feet square of pinks or asters, or daisies, all growing free and
easy and he will tell you that he likes them. All this has a particular
application to the farmer, who is often said to dislike flowers. He
grows potatoes and buckwheat and weeds by the acre: two or three unhappy
pinks or geraniums are not enough to make an impression.

Lawn flower-beds.

The easiest way to spoil a good lawn is to put a flower-bed in it; and
the most effective way in which to show off flowers to the least
advantage is to plant them in a bed in the greensward. Flowers need a
background. We do not hang our pictures on fence-posts. If flowers are
to be grown on a lawn, let them be of the hardy kind, which can be
naturalized in the sod and which grow freely in the tall unmown grass;
or else perennials of such nature that they make attractive clumps by
themselves. Lawns should be free and generous, but the more they are cut
up and worried with trivial effects, the smaller and meaner they look.

[Illustration: Fig. 19 Hole-in-the-ground gardening]

But even if we consider these lawn flower-beds wholly apart from their
surroundings, we must admit that they are at best unsatisfactory. It
generally amounts to this, that we have four months of sparse and