If your garden is so small as to hold only a single group of plants, you will scarcely care to buy a single month of superlative perfection at the expense of eleven months of dullness and desolation. But where the gardening is on a more extensive scale, the artist may distribute his beauties into any sort of an annual cyclorama which he chooses.

In any event, the garden will gain a most acceptable variety by having regard to the seasons. The gardener will cultivate those plants and trees which thrive best depending on the present season. The competent gardener should be able, out of his own knowledge, to select the most pleasing- materials for his pictures. The light gray-greens are perhaps characteristic of the early Spring.

As trees and shrubs put forth their first unfolding buds, the general effect is much different from that given by the same plants after the full dress of foliage is put on. Usually the color is several shades lighter—grayer—and this appearance is further heightened by the grayer twigs not yet covered but showing more and more dimly through the thickening screen of green leaves.

Certain plants are more beautiful in this spring dress than at any subsequent season. Some of the willows should be prominently mentioned in this category; for example, the Royal willow, Salix Regalis. Among the smaller flowering plants there is an especially rich field of possibilities, including crocus, narcissus, jonquils, hyacinths, tulips and others, most of which and be used in decorative garden planters.

These are suitable not only to be the first occupants of the bleak flower beds after the mulch is removed in the spring, but they should be scattered with a liberal hand through the grass and in the borders, where they come on year after year amid surroundings which make them seem even more dainty and graceful and delightful harbingers of returning spring than when grown in specially prepared beds.

June is the month of roses, brides and college graduates. It is particularly a month of fetes and carefree enjoyment of living. Weddings and commencements are the gardener's good patrons, and for them the grounds may well put on their holiday attire.

June is the youthful gala time of the garden; and the bold and blushing, smiling and nodding, vain and conscious roses, which would be thought immodest amid the tranquility of summer or the somberness of autumn, are now received with gladness as the fitting expression of our exuberant emotions.

Flowers in abundance, with roses predominating; bright colors and heavy perfumes; with blacks and grays and old folks kept in the back ground—these are the colors for the June picture, the chords for the June music.

In midsummer nothing is more delightful than quiet rest under cooling shade. No flashing colors for us now. No jarring contrasts for the tired eyes. The trees now invite us with their thickest canopy of foliage; and if beneath them stretches a cool, clean greensward, and if the shadows fall all untroubled into a still pool near by, we rest amid these scenes with an overflowing gratitude for the kind hands by which they are provided.

We have fled the dusty highway, the burning streets, the noise and hurry and commotion of business. Quiet and solitude are our chief desires. These feelings, common to all men at such times, indicate unequivocally the duty of the gardener.