I shall now give you a list of half-hardy plants for autumn, as most of the annuals will begin to look shabby in July or the beginning of August. No. 1. Verbèna Melíndres, bright scarlet; No. 2. Œnothèra Drummóndi, yellow; No. 3. Lobèlia bícolor, blue; No. 4. Calceolària rugòsa, pegged down; No. 5. Verbèna Tweediàna, crimson; No. 6. common White Petunia; No. 7. Verbèna Arraniàna, or Henderson's purple; No. 8. Calceolària integrifòlia, yellow; No. 9. Purple Petunia; No. 10. Verbèna teucrioìdes, white; No. 11. Frogmore Pelargonium, bright scarlet; No. 12. Musk plant, yellow.
In October the following bulbs and other plants may be put in for flowering in early spring. No. 1. Von Thol Tulips; No. 2. Cloth of Gold, or common Yellow Crocuses; No. 3. Blue Hepatica; No. 4. Yellow Crocuses, or White Anemone; No. 5. Scílla vérna and sibírica, blue; No. 6. Àrabis álbida, white; No. 7. Double Pink Hepatica; No. 8. Winter Aconite; No. 9. Purple Crocuses; No. 10. Snowdrops; No. 11. Primroses; No. 12. White Hepatica, or Àrabis alpìna.
If you do not like the plan for a garden which I have sent you, you can draw one according to your own fancy, of any figure you like; but, as I believe you have not yet a regular gardener, it will be necessary to teach you how to transfer the plan you have decided upon from the paper to the ground. In the first place, the ground must be dug over, raked, and made perfectly smooth. The pattern, if a complicated one, must then be drawn on Berlin paper, which is covered with regular squares, and the ground to be laid out must be covered with similar squares, but larger; the usual proportion being that a square inch on the paper represents a square foot on the ground. The squares on the ground are usually formed by sticking in wooden pegs at regular distances, and fastening strings, from peg to peg, till the whole ground is covered with a kind of latticework of string. Each string is then chalked, and made to thrill by pulling it up sharply and letting it go again, which transfers the chalk from the string to the ground. When the ground is thus covered with white squares, it is easy to trace upon it, with a sharp-pointed stick, any pattern which may have been drawn on the paper; the portion in each square on the ground being copied on a larger scale from that of the corresponding square on the paper.
Fig. 8. Plan for a Flower-Garden.
Simple patterns (fig. 8.), consisting of straight lines, need only to be measured, and pieces of string stretched from pegs put in at the proper distances, so as to form straight lines, oblongs, squares, triangles, or diamonds. If a circle is to be traced, it is done by getting a piece of string half the length of the diameter of the circle, with a piece of stick tied to each end. One stick is then driven into the ground in the centre of the circle, and a line is traced with a stick at the other extremity of the string which is drawn out quite tight. An oval is made by tracing two circles, the circumscribing line of one of which just touches the centre of the other; short lines are afterwards made at the top and bottom, and the central lines are obliterated. A square only requires a peg at each corner, with a chalked string drawn from peg to peg; and an oblong, or parallelogram, is made by joining two common squares, and taking off the corners if required.
Fig. 9.
A heart-shaped pattern (fig. 9.) is made by drawing a straight line from a to b, and then fixing a peg with a string tied to it, half the length of the straight line, and another peg at the end, exactly in the middle of the line, and drawing a half-circle with it; then taking a peg with a string half the length of the other, and another peg tied to the end, and tracing with it the smaller half-circles, c and d. With the same strings and pegs you may easily trace, or rather have traced, figs. 10 and 11. Even the latter, which appears at first sight a very difficult figure to form on the ground, will be just as easily traced as the others. You will observe, that in all these figures the straight line is only to serve as a guide to show the proper places for fixing the pegs; and that it is only to be formed by a piece of string stretched by pegs from one end of the figure to the other, which is to be removed as soon as the figure is sketched, and which is not to be traced on the ground at all.
