For with planning, it is possible to maintain flowers in your garden during entire length of growing season. Borders and beds are planted with flowering annuals and perennials which bloom at different periods during year. By choosing carefully initially, and by caring for flowers thereafter, blooms will overlap each other, so that there will never be a period when an old bloom disappears but that a new one will start to show its color.

Preparing soil for flower beds or borders requires greater care than planting a lawn. For one thing, digging must be deeper. It is not too much to dig bed 2 feet deep, although 1 1/2 feet is suitable. It is, of course, possible to grow flowers in a shallower bed than this, but deeper you dig, better your production will be.

All heavy lumps should be broken up. It is a good idea to spread some sand, cinders or ashes in bottom soil to break it up. Also, you might work manure, well-rotted compost, grass clippings or peat moss into bottom. Do not firm bottom soil down, but let it settle naturally.

The plant materials generally used for hedges are mentioned elsewhere in this book. They include tall background hedges of holly, thorn or wattle; informal flowering hedges of rose, bridal wreath spirea or barberry; Such evergreens as mugho pine, globe arbor vitae, box or eunonymus (most of which are used as low edgings) and colorful fruit and-nut hedges of thorn apple, hazlenut, cherry, beach plum, cranberry and quince.

And, of course, there are formal clipped hedges. Of these, Amur privet is by far most widely used. In fact, privet is used so universally that it is original to choose any of above for hedging.