The sole purpose of a garden is to accommodate beauty in the form of artistic patio statuary and living plants. Therefore beds and borders should be made so that they will furnish everything that a plant demands of the soil. This implies not only that the soil shall be of such a nature as to supply abundant food for the roots, but that it shall be of sufficient depth and of proper consistency, and that it shall not contain any undesirable constituents.

Soils are as we find them, and not always as we would have them, so that the gardener who, by force of circumstances, has to till an intractable soil, must adopt artificial means to bring it into a better condition.

Let us assume that the gardener is breaking virgin ground, say a piece of old pasture. He has staked out the main lines of his garden plan, and is about to make his beds and borders. The soil consists of a top-spit of brown loam overlying clay subsoil. If the latter is stiff clay, and insufficient surface soil overlies it, the gardener may have to face the necessity of importing additional material.

But let us assume that the consistency of the subsoil is not as hopeless as the above assumption would imply. Then the proper procedure is to bring soil and subsoil into intimate admixture, so that one may temper the other, and to do so to such a depth as the ordinary requirements of horticulture demand of about two feet.

This is best done by the operation known as "trenching.” Trenching is a term applied strictly to spade work for doing deep tilling. This is different from digging in which you only turn over the soil. Trenching is best done in the late fall months before the weather turns cold.

There are various ways of doing it according to what results you want and the previous condition of the ground. In "full-trenching" the process has the effect of reversing the relative positions of the upper and lower layers of soil, so that that which was situated, say, two feet below the surface comes to the top, and the top layer goes to the lower level.

A complete reversal may be admirable treatment for ground which has long been in tillage, and therefore already broken up to the trenching depth, but it would be inadvisable in the case of new ground, the subsoil of which had not seen the light perhaps for centuries. On such ground the subsoil would be compacted and wanting entirely in the constituents which furnish food for plants. It is clear, therefore, that if full-trenching were adopted the gardener would have a very poor surface layer in which to grow his flowers.

A better plan would be to "half-trench," which consists in removing the surface soil in sections, then breaking up the subsoil with a fork, and subsequently replacing the surface soil. But there is still a better method for the garden maker, designed to effect the more or less complete mixing of the soil and subsoil to the desired depth. This is the method to use if this is the main object in trenching the ground. To perform the trenching operation, open the ground to the full depth by cutting a trench across the border.

The soil removed may at once be carried to a position near the far end of the border. The gardener then proceeds to fill up the trench at A with soil taken alternately from B and C, D and E, and so on till he reaches the end of the border, when the space left must be filled in with the soil that has been taken there for the purpose. If the land is old pasture, care should be taken to bury the turfs, so they may in due time rot and thereby contribute their quota to enriching the soil.

Although the primary object of trenching is to produce a workable soil of sufficient depth, incidentally assisting drainage and effecting aeration, it affords a good opportunity for enriching the soil by incorporating with it a proportion of manure. In the making of beds and borders in a new garden this opportunity should not be neglected.

Therefore the gardener should have at hand a heap of good manure, and as the work proceeds this should be added to the soil at a regular rate, until the whole contents of the border has been treated. This must be done in a manner which ensures that the manure be well distributed in depth, not merely added to the surface layer, so that when the plants send down their roots they will find the food they need.