AS we told you in our first chapter, the worst piece of ground you can have for a garden is one already occupied by the roots of trees and coarse-growing shrubs or hedges. All around London Privet hedges and grimy Laurels are to be seen everywhere, and wherever people try to grow flowers near their thievish roots the flowers languish. You may put a few Crocuses in front of a group of Laurels, but you will not get much else to flourish. Even that hardiest of Saxifrages, London Pride, leads a starved life, and you cannot know how beautiful it is until you have seen it sending up masses of its foamy pink flowers in good air and from good soil. If you not only have an impoverished and shady garden, but one under the drip of trees, you will not be able to do much with it. Still, we can tell you about a few things we persuaded to live in a situation of this kind not far from London. You must understand that the two authors of this book have had very different gardening experiences. One is the mistress of a large and very beautiful garden running down to the sea in the West of England, while the other has been a wanderer on the face of the earth, and has worked in many gardens of varying sizes. It is usually her fate to find a wilderness, delve like Adam in it till it is a garden, and then go her ways to the next wilderness. The one you are to hear of now was not a pleasant country wilderness, where even the Briars and Nettles are growing in good clean soil and in fresh air. It was one of those disheartening builders’ gardens, where the earth looks a sort of unwholesome lumpy drab, and is full of old bricks and ginger-beer bottles. One side of it was bounded by a Privet hedge, and the soil was starved, but as it was sunny, we got the strong herbaceous things and pinks to do well in it. The other side, which was under great Horse-Chestnuts and Laburnums, got no sun at all, looked very bare, and was evidently wretched soil. We had it well dug and dressed, and planted clumps of Michaelmas Daisy, of Iris Germanica, and of the common Evening Primrose a little way back. The Michaelmas Daisies soon made big bushes, and did very well. The Evening Primroses flowered, but ran up rather tall and spindly. The Iris did not flower well, but it increased, and made a clump of handsome leaves. In front we found that the Perennial Candytuft (Iberis Sempervirens) did well, and increased quickly. You can hardly have a more satisfactory plant for the front of a border of this kind. Crocuses came up year after year, too, but we never persuaded our Daffodils to flower more than once in this garden. Annuals we advise you strongly not to try. They are a source of disappointment in such circumstances. The pretty little yellow-flowered shrub St. John’s Wort should do well under trees, and so will some hardy Ferns.