I soon came to find out that a herbaceous scheme in that place was a mistake. For two months we had to look at flowers growing, for a month we had to look at things rampant, and for a month we had to watch things withering. At no time was there an equal show of colour in all the beds. The blaze of beauty I had hoped for never appeared: here and there we had a flash of it, but it soon flickered out, much to our disappointment. If the period of the ramp had synchronised for all the beds it would not have been so bad; but when one subject was rampant the others were couchant, and no one was pleased. The next year we tried some more dwarf varieties and such annuals as verbenas, zinnias, scabious, godetias, and clarkias, but although every one came on all right, yet they did not come on simultaneously, and I felt defrauded of my chromatic effects. A considerable number of people thought the beds quite a success; but we could not see with their eyes, and our feeling was one of disappointment. Happily, at this time I bought for a few shillings a few boxes of the ordinary _echeveria secunda glauca_, and, curiously enough, the same day I came upon a public place where several beds of the same type as mine, set in an enclosed space of emerald grass, were planted with echeveria and other succulents, in patterns, with a large variety of brilliantly-coloured foliage and a few dwarf calceolarias and irisines. In a moment I thought I saw that this was exactly what I needed--whether it was carpet bedding or early Victorian or inartistic, this was what I wanted, and I knew that I should not be happy until I got it. Every bed looked like a stanza of Keats, or a box of enamels from the Faubourg de Magnine in Limoges, where Nicholas Laudin worked. That was three years ago, and although I planted out over three thousand echeverias last summer, 1 had not to buy another box of the same variety; I had only to find some other succulents and transplant some violas in order to achieve all that I hoped for from these beds. For three years they have been altogether satisfying with their orderly habits and reposeful colouring. The glauca is the shade that the human eye can rest upon day after day without weariness, and the pink and blue and yellow and purple violas which I asked for a complement of colours, do all that I hoped they would do. Of course we have friends who walk round the garden, look at those beds with dull eyes of disapproval, and walk on after imparting information on some contentious point, such as the necessity to remove the shoots from the briers of standard roses, or the assurance that the slugs are fond of the leaves of hollyhock. We have an occasional visitor who says,-- “Isn't carpet-bedding rather old-fashioned?” So I have seen a lady in the spacious days of the late seventies shake her head and smile pityingly in a room furnished with twelve ribbon-back chairs made by the great Director.