Flower-Garden Fashions.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 227, 5 November 1887, Page 3

Flower-Garden Fashions.

Fashions change in the {lower-garden, as in many other things, only they do not change so often. The " bedding .system " has had its day, and now it is on the wane. It began manj' years ago. Regular patterns and beds filled with ilowers of bright and well contrasted colours form the basis of this system. In some .situations it is efl'ectn c and appropriate, but often it is entirely incongruous, and sometimes even ridiculous. The labour necessitated in providing thousands of plants of annuals for bedding out each spring is something enormous, that only gardeners appreciate. The summit of the system, so far as effect is concerned, is the carpet bedding or " Mo-uiicul-ture." They involve vast cost, if done on any proper scale, and they arc the perfection of the artificial. But that is the trouble. They are too artificial ; they have a pitiable sameness of appearance ; no vase^ and urns in parlour or hall are filled from ribbon or mosaic beds, for flowering plants are seldom used for this purpose. Plants with glaucous or coloured foliage, alternantheras, sedums, echeverias, amaranthuses and coleuses being among available sorts. The more modern idea, the new fashion that begins to rule, is much more intelligent and artistic. It returns to the old and natural way of arranging plants in beds, borders and shrubbery, just as oldfashioned people who love flowers for their own sakes, have been doing all these yeais. Instead of growing a few hundied.s or thouoands ot plants, of but three or four sorts, with much labour at large expense, both sadly misdirected, the idea now is that a garden should consist of a number of the handsomest herbaceous plants, shrubs and annuals arranged in a miscellaneous manner, so that beautifully and continuously, all the circle of the year, changes of interest si.all occur. Here a flower will be in bud, there one just beginning to fade, in one place a tender shoot emerging softly from the moist earth, in another a plant crowned with full glory of bloom. The larger the variety is, in this system, and the better they are grouped, the finer the effect will be, and the more pleasurc-gh ing the garden will seem.