How to Make a Flower Garden A Manual of Practical Information and Suggestions (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from How to Make a Flower Garden: A Manual of Practical Information and Suggestions
The home garden is for the affections. It is for quality. Its size is wholly immaterial if only it have the best. I do not mean the rarest or the costliest, but the best - the best geranium or the best lilac. Even the fruit garden and the vegetable garden are also for the affections: one can buy ordinary fruits and vegetables - it never pays to grow them in the home garden. When you want something superior, you must grow it, or else buy it at an advanced price directly from some one who grows for quality and not for quantity. If you want the very choicest and the most personal products, almost necessarily you must grow them: the value of these things cannot be measured in money. The commercial gardener may grow what the market wants, and the market wants chiefly what is cheap and good looking. The home gardener should grow what the market cannot supply, else the home garden is not worth the while.
A garden is a place in which plants are grown, and "plants" are herbs and vines and bushes and trees and grass. Too often do persons think that only formal and pretentious places are gardens. But an open lawn about the house may be a garden; so may a row of hollyhocks along the wall or an arrangement of plants in the greenhouse. Usually there is some central feature to a garden, a theme to which all other parts relate. This may be a walk or a summer-house or a sun-dial or a garden bed or the residence itself, or a brook falling down the sward between trees and bushes and clumpy growths.
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