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Planning Your Garden

The two methods are here illustrated for the sake of comparison, and a glance at the figures will sufficiently convince the reader as to which method is most likely to please the eye.

There is no need to make the grass level if the ground has a natural slope, provided, of course, "King Tennis" does not rule. On the contrary, sloping ground greatly assists drainage, and ensures that puddles shall not lodge on the surface, which, on heavy ground, would inevitably occur on a dead-level plot.

Making Beds And Borders

BEING intended solely for the purpose of accommodating living plants, beds and borders should be made so that they will furnish everything that a plant demands of the soil. This implies not only that the soil shall be of such a nature as to supply abundant food for the roots, but that it shall be of sufficient depth and of proper consistency, and that it shall contain no undesirable constituents.

Soils are as we find them, and not always as we would have them, so that the gardener who, by force of circumstances, has to till an intractable soil, must adopt artificial means to bring it into a better condition. Reference has already been made to the subject in Chapter II.

Let us assume that the gardener is breaking virgin ground, say a piece of old pasture. He has staked out the main lines of his garden plan, and is about to make his beds and borders. The soil consists of a top-spit of brown loam overlying a clayey subsoil. If the latter is a stiff clay, and insufficient surface soil overlies it, the gardener may have to face the necessity of importing additional material. But let us assume that the consistency of the subsoil is not so hopeless as the above assumption would imply. Then the proper procedure is to bring soil and subsoil into intimate admixture, so that one may temper the other, and to do so to such a depth as the ordinary requirements of horticulture demand. In most circumstances this may be taken as two feet or thereabout. This is best done by the operation known as "trenching," now to be explained.