For many years of her life one of the authors of this book was obliged to live mostly in London without a square yard of garden, but so great was her love of flowers and her desire to grow them that by degrees she made a ‘room garden’ for herself, and found endless interest and pleasure in it. She was prepared from the first to spend some time each day in feeding, washing, watering, and shifting her plants; otherwise success would have been impossible. Unfortunately, most of us know how miserable neglected or misunderstood plants soon get to look in a room—their leaves yellow and dusty, their flowers stunted, their soil either baked hard for want of water or sour and mossy through having more than they can digest. We fear that if you are unlucky enough to have gas in your room you cannot have healthy plants at all—at any rate, you would have to content yourself with one or two that you could carry out of your gas-poisoned air every evening. But if you have no gas, and a sunny window in which you can place a good-sized plain wooden table, you may have a delightful room garden, as well as some pot plants in other places. To begin with, you would want some of the well-known hardy foliage plants that you can get from any good nurseryman. One of the best known is the Aspidistra, or Parlour Palm. You can get it with plain green or with variegated leaves. If it is in good health it sends up new leaves every spring, and makes queer dwarf flowers. When it seems too crowded for its pot you can either give it a bigger one, with some fresh soil, or divide it. This should be done in April or May. Young gardeners often make the mistake of giving a plant too big a pot when they change it. They hope in this way to persuade their plant to grow to a great size, but what they really do is to give its roots more soil than they can keep healthy, so it languishes or dies. One, or at most two, sizes larger than the last pot should be used, or, in the case of Aspidistras, you can divide and repot into the same size, or even smaller ones. Some people say these plants are impatient of disturbance, but we have found them easy to manage with a little care. Never use pots that are not both _dry_ and _clean_. If they are dirty they must be well scrubbed with soap and hot water, and then well dried before you use them. You must also get a little good soil from a nursery gardener before you divide or repot any of your plants.