The Home Garden has it's own spirit. It's size is wholly immaterial. It doesn't have to be the rarest or the costliest, but the best-the best geranium or the best lilac. Even the fruit garden and the vegetable garden also have their own spirit. When you want something superior however you must grow it or else buy it at a higher price directly from someone who grows for quality not quantity. If you want the best or choicest you must grow them yourself. The value of these things cannot be measured in money.
The commercial nurseries may grow what the market wants and the market wants chiefly what is cheap and looks good. The home gardener should grow what the market cannot supply or the home garden is not worth the time.
A garden is a place in which plants are grown as well as herbs, vines, bushes, trees and grass. Too often people think that only formal and pretentious places are gardens. But an open lawn around the house may be a garden or a row of holly along a wall or an arrangement of plants in the greenhouse.
Usually there is some central feature to a garden, a them 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 between shrubs, bushes or clumpy growths.
There are many forms and kinds of gardens as there are persons who have gardens; and this is one reason why the garden appeals to everyone. and why it may become the expression of personality. The simplest garden is likely to be the best, merely because it is the expression of a simple and teachable life.
Grow the plants you want but do not want too many. Most persons when they make a garden order a quantity of labels. Fatal mistake! Labels are for collections of plants-collections so big that you cannot remember. And when you cannot remember you lose the intimacy you lose the essence of the garden.
Choose a few plants for the main plantings. The should be hardy, vigorous and sure the thrive in all types of weather. These plants you can buy in quantity and in large strong specimens.
Each clump or group or border may be dominated by one kind of plant-foxgloves, hollyhocks, spireas, asters. Miscellaneous mixtures are rarely satisfactory. The point is that the character of the home garden should be given by the plants that are most sure to thrive. The novelties and oddities should be subjects of experiment;if they fail the garden sill remains.
David Cormier currently publishes a blog http://www.squidoo.com/homegardening101
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