THE COTTAGE GARDEN

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A large garden affords more choice—and room for those most traditional of flowers, heirloom roses. There is a revival of interest in these full , sweet-scented, drooping, romantic beauties, and so, after a period of neglect, they're available again. We can thank the cottage gardener for helping to preserve them. In those long-ago gardens, roses, lilies, and foxgloves were often planted together, and there still is no better combination. Among the cottagelike roses available for the small garden, the polyanthas are especially recommended for their vigor and profusion yet apparent daintiness.

Another type of plant much loved in the past but mostly ignored now is the vine. Vines growing around a doorway, over an arch or arbor, against a wall, or scrambling across trees and bushes soften the contrasts in a landscape or garden. I've put up log arches at my garden's two entries, both through a barberry hedge, and have planted climbing roses and wisteria at each arch. In addition, roses and clematis round the corners of my house. Choose a small-flowered, graceful clematis such as sweet autumn, downy, golden, or montana rubens. In milder climates, you can grow a colorful vining fuchsia, a favorite in the traditional cottage garden.

Avid vegetable gardeners have learned to practice successional planting to maximize yields. The flower gardener should consider using succession, too, to achieve a continuous display of bloom. As a general guideline, late bloomers whose foliage is not too dense to shade out plants below should be planted among lower-growing early bloomers. Some examples of space-saving interplantings of tall, airy plants and low, denser ones are delphiniums over primroses, lilies among roses, clary sage over columbines, bee balm over sweet Williams, and larkspur among cardinal flowers. With wider spacing, almost any combination is possible.

Another vegetable—raiser's trick is choosing for hardiness — especially since one wants the garden to grow as freely and naturally as possible. Often, heirloom-species plants are hardier and more in keeping with the cottage garden than are overly large-flowered hybrids, which often lack grace and may appear gaudy next to their gentler predecessors. Some of our own native wildflowers-such as black-eyed Susans, spiderwort, great blue lobelias, cardinal flowers, bee balm, cranesbill geraniums, goatsbeard, forget-me-nots, bluebells, loosestrife, and creeping jenny make excellent cottage plants.

In olden times, the cottage gardener usually acquired plants by getting a division or some seeds from someone else, so generous, easy-growing specimens were widely spread around. To give a start of a favorite plant to a friend is still among the nicest of gifts and is the quickest and cheapest way to help expand someone's collection.

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