it personally, or in any way likes it well enough to take a great deal of trouble about it. To those who know, the garden speaks of itself, for it clearly reflects individual thought and influence; and it is in these lesser gardens that, with rare and happy exceptions, the watchful care and happy invention of the beneficent individuality stamps itself upon the place. There is nothing more interesting to one of these ardent and honest workers than to see the garden of another. Plants that had hitherto been neglected or overlooked are seen used in ways that had never been thought of, and here will be found new combinations of colour that had never been attempted, and methods of use and treatment differing in some manner to those that had been seen before. There is nothing like the true gardening for training the eye and mind to the habit of close observation; that precious acquirement that invests every country object both within and without the garden’s bounds with a living interest, and that insensibly builds up that bulk of mentally noted incident or circumstance that, taken in and garnered by that wonderful storehouse the brain, seems there to sort itself, to distribute, to arrange, to classify, to reduce into order, in such a way as to increase the knowledge of something of which there was at first only a mental glimpse; so to build up in orderly structure a well-founded knowledge of many of those things of every-day out-door life that adds so greatly to its present enjoyment and later usefulness. So it comes about that some of us gardeners, searching for ways of best displaying our flowers, have observed that whereas it is best, as a general rule, to mass the warm colours (reds and yellows) rather together, so it is best to treat the blues with contrasts, either of direct complementary colour, or at any rate with some kind of yellow, or with clear white. So that whereas it would be less pleasing to put scarlet flowers directly against bright blue, and whereas flowers of purple colouring can be otherwise much more suitably treated, the juxtaposition of the splendid blues of the perennial Larkspurs with the rich colour of the orange Herring Lily (_Lilium croceum_) is a bold and grand assortment of colour of the most satisfactory effect. This fine Lily is one of those easiest to grow in most gardens. The true flower-lovers, as defined above, take the trouble to find out which are the Lilies that will suit their particular grounds; for it is generally understood that the soil and conditions of any one garden are not likely to suit a large number of different kinds of these delightful plants. Four or five successful kinds are about the average, and the owner is lucky if the superb White Lily is among them. But Lilies are so beautiful, so full of character, so important among other flowers or in places almost by themselves, that, when it is known which are the right ones to grow, those kinds should be well and rather largely used.