It is just this self-education that is needed for the higher and more thoughtful gardening, whose outcome is the simply conceived and beautiful pictures, whether they are pictures painted with the brush on paper or canvas, or with living plants in the open ground. In both cases it needs alike the training of the eye to observe, of the brain to note, and of the hand to work out the interpretation. The garden artist--by which is to be understood the true lover of good flowers, who has taken the trouble to learn their ways and wants and moods, and to know it all so surely that he can plant with the assured belief that the plants he sets will do as he intends, just as the painter can [Illustration: PHLOX AND DAISY FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF LADY MOUNT-STEPHEN] compel and command the colours on his palette--plants with an unerring hand and awaits the sure result. When one says “the simplest means,” it does not always mean the easiest. Many people begin their gardening by thinking that the making and maintaining of a handsome and well-filled flower-border is quite an easy matter. In fact, it is one of the most difficult problems in the whole range of horticultural practice--wild gardening perhaps excepted. To achieve anything beyond the ordinary commonplace mixture, that is without plan or forethought, and that glares with the usual faults of bad colour-combinations and yawning, empty gaps, needs years of observation and a considerable knowledge of plants and their ways as individuals. For border plants to be at their best must receive special consideration as to their many and different wants. We have to remember that they are gathered together in our gardens from all the temperate regions of the world, and from every kind of soil and situation. From the sub-arctic regions of Siberia to the very edges of the Sahara; from the cool and ever-moist flanks of the Alps to the sun-dried coasts of the Mediterranean; from the Cape, from the great mountain ranges of India; from the cool and temperate Northern States of America--the home of the species from which our garden Phloxes are derived; from the sultry slopes of Chili and Peru, where the Alströmerias thrust their roots deep down into the earth searching for the precious moisture.