By July there are still more of our tall garden flowers; the stately Delphiniums, seven, eight, and nine feet high; tall white Lilies; the tall yellow Meadow-Rues, Hollyhocks, and Sweet Peas in plenty.
By August we are in autumn; and it is the month of the tall Phloxes. There are some who dislike the sweet, faint and yet strong scent of these flowers; to me it is one of the delights of the flower year.
No garden flower has been more improved of late years; a whole new range of excellent and brilliant colouring has been developed. I can remember when the only Phloxes were a white and a poor Lilac; the individual flowers were small and starry and set rather widely apart. They were straggly-looking things, though always with the welcome sweet scent. Nowadays we all know the beauty of these fine flowers; the large size of the massive heads and of the individual blooms; the pure whites, the good Lilacs and Pinks, and that most desirable range of salmon-rose colourings, of which one of the first that made a lively stir in the world of horticulture was the one called Lothair. In its own colouring of tender salmon-rose it is still one of the best. Careful seed-saving among the brighter flowers of this colouring led to the tints tending towards scarlet, among which Etna was a distinct advance, to be followed, a year or two later, by the all-conquering Coquelicot. Some florists have also pushed this docile flower into a range of colouring which is highly distasteful to the trained colour-eye of the educated amateur; a series of rank purples and virulent magentas; but these can be avoided. What is now most wanted, and seems to be coming, is a range of tender, rather light Pinks, that shall have no trace of the rank quality that seems so unwilling to leave the Phloxes of this colouring.
Garden Phloxes were originally hybrids of two or three North American species; for garden purposes they are divided into two groups, the earlier, blooming in July, much shorter in stature and more bushy, being known as the suffruticosa group, the later, taller kinds being classed as the decussata. They are a little shy of direct sunlight, though they can bear it in strong soils where the roots are always cool. They like plenty of food and moisture; in poor, dry, sandy soils they fail absolutely, and even if watered and carefully watched, look miserable objects.
But where Phloxes do well, and this is in most good garden ground, they are the glory of the August flower-border.
In the teaching and practice of good gardening the fact can never be too persistently urged nor too trustfully accepted, that the best effects are accomplished by the simplest means. The garden artist or artist gardener is for ever searching for these simple pictures; generally the happy combination of some two kinds of flowers that bloom at the same time, and that make either kindly harmonies or becoming contrasts.
In trying to work out beautiful garden effects, besides those purposely arranged, it sometimes happens that some little accident—such as the dropping of a seed, that has grown and bloomed where it was not sown—may suggest some delightful combination unexpected and unthought of. At another time some small spot of colour may be observed that will give the idea of the use of this colour in some larger treatment.
It is just this self-education that is needed for the higher and more thoughtful gardening, whose outcome is the simply conceived and beautiful pictures, whether they are pictures painted with the brush on paper or canvas, or with living plants in the open ground. In both cases it needs alike the training of the eye to observe, of the brain to note, and of the hand to work out the interpretation.
The garden artist—by which is to be understood the true lover of good flowers, who has taken the trouble to learn their ways and wants and moods, and to know it all so surely that he can plant with the assured belief that the plants he sets will do as he intends, just as the painter can
