Well, if the owner has either no taste for gardening, or no time, it may be the shortest and brightest plan to get some nurseryman near to fill the little beds and borders with spring bedding plants for spring (and let me note that this _spring bedding_, which is of later date than the first rage for ribbon-borders, had to draw its supplies very largely from "herbaceous stuff" _myosotis_, _viola_, _aubretia_, _iberis_, &c., and may have paved the way for the return of hardy perennials into favor), and with Tom Thumb Geranium, Blue Lobelia, and Yellow Calceolaria for the summer and autumn. These latter are most charming plants. They are very gay and persistent whilst they last, and it is not their fault that they cannot stand our winters. They are no invalids till frost comes. With my personal predilections, I like even "bedding stuff" best in variety. The varieties of what we call geraniums are many and most beautiful. I should always prefer a group of individual specimens to a band of one. And never have I seen the canary yellow of calceolarias to such advantage as in an "old-fashioned" rectory-garden in Yorkshire, where they were cunningly used as points of brilliancy at corners of beds mostly filled with "hardy herbaceous stuff." But there, again, one begins to spend time and taste! Let us admit that, if a little garden must be made gay by the neighboring nurseryman, it will look very bright, on the "ribbon" system, at a minimum cost of time and trouble--_but not of money!_ Even for a little garden, bedding plants are very expensive. For you must either use plenty, or leave it alone. A ragged ribbon-border can have no admirers. If time and money are both lacking, and horticulture is not a hobby, divide what sum you are prepared to spend on your little garden in two. Lay out half in making good soil, and spend the rest on a limited range of hardy plants. If mother earth is well fed, and if you have got her _deep down_, and not a surface layer of half a foot on a substratum of builder's rubbish, she will take care of every plant you commit to her hold. I should give up the back of the borders (if the aspect is east or south) to a few very good "perpetual" roses to cut from; dwarfs, not standards; and for the line of color in front it will be no great trouble to arrange roughly to have red, white, blue, and yellow alternately.