Such a garden is this of Mr. Elgood’s; in a midland county, and on a strong soil that throws up good hardy plants in vigorous luxuriance. Here grow the great Orange Lilies--the Herring Lilies of [Illustration: RAMSCLIFFE: ORANGE LILIES & MONKSHOOD FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF MR. C. E. FREELING] the Dutch, because they bloom at the time of the herring harvest--six and seven feet high, and with them the Monkshood, with its tall spikes of hooded bloom. In poorer soils or with worse culture these fine flowers are of much lower growth, the Monkshood often only half the height, with its deeply-cut leaves yellowing before their time with the weakness of too-early maturity. The pleasure with which one sees this fine old garden flower is, however, always a little lessened by the knowledge of the dangerously poisonous nature of the whole plant, and especially of the root. It is the deadly Aconite of pharmacy. Another of the same family is grouped with it; the yellow Aconite of the Austrian mountains, with branched heads of sulphur-coloured bloom and singularly handsome leaves--large, dark green, glistening and persistently enduring--for, long after the bloom is past, they are beautiful in the border. How well an artist knows the value of grey-leaved plants, and their use in pictorial gardening in the way of giving colour-value by close companionship, to tender pinks and lilacs, and, above all, to whites! A patch of white bloom is often too hard and sudden and inharmonious to satisfy the trained eye, but led up to and softened and sweetened by masses of neighbouring tender grey it takes its proper place and comes to its right strength in the well-ordered scheme. Lavender, Lavender-cotton (_Santolina_), Catmint, Pinks and Carnations, and the Woolly Woundwort (_Stachys_) with some other plants of hoary foliage, do this good work. In this garden the Woundwort, there known by its old Midland name of “Our Saviour’s Blanket,” throws up its grey-pink heads of bloom from a thick carpet of rather large leaves, silvery soft with their thick coating of long white down. Here a groundwork of it leads to the group of white Peach-leaved Bell-flower on the right and to the tall white Gnaphalium, a plant of kindred woolliness, on the left, while the precious grey quality runs through the left-hand flower-group by means of the downy-coated pods of the earlier-blooming Lupins, purposely left among the later flowers for this and for their handsome form. How finely the Orange Lilies tell against the background of the holly hedge, at the path-end cut into an arbour, may well be seen in the picture, and how kindly and gracefully the Greengage Plum-tree bends over and plays its appointed part. Such a flower border makes many a picture in the hands of a garden-artist. His knowledge of the plants, their colours, seasons, habits and stature, enables him to use them as he uses the colours on his palette.