THREE FURTHER COUNSELS Spread before you is a brief survey of the riches that we have at hand from herbaceous plants; it is for you now to make your selection for each part of your garden where you want several plants to act as a fore-ground to the greater shrubs; under the latter may be grouped spring bulbs and shade-loving plants for spring flowering such as hellebores and lungworts. By so doing you will be extracting the maximum amount of flower per square yard. There are three further counsels to be offered to you: remember always that it is the plant that counts, not just the flowers. If the whole plant looks respectable during its growing period, apart from its flowers, your garden will gain immeasurably. But returning once again to delphiniums, they can be grown and enjoyed in the mixed border-or anywhere in the garden-and an old dodge of Miss Jekyll's was to plant a perennial pea, Lathyrus latifolius, in its white or puce form, so that with support it could be trained up to cover the barren stems. Likewise she used Gypsophila paniculata to plant behind oriental poppies so that the former took the place of the poppies in summer when they had died down. These expedients prove that even with plants which do not remain in beauty through the season there are ways and means. Another point is directly concerned, once again, with foliage. Nowadays there are many variegated plants on the market; they are irresistible in a garden centre -particularly if they are evergreen-but a source of embarrassment when one takes them home. An occasional plant with "coloured" foliage can work wonders, in fact they are valuable to enhance colour scheming; but too many become wearisome and unsettling and one longs for quiet greens. Here the beauty of one variegated plant must be extolled! Tovara virginkna var. filiformis 'Painter's Palette'; it slowly forms a clump of leaves whose colours include green, cream and brown. Thirdly, the shape of foliage is the most important thing; let its colour be green as a general rule so long as shape and texture are different from that of the next. This, of course, applies as much to shrubs as it does to plants, and to trees as well if one is thinking in landscape scale. Today grey foliage is very popular and it has not the unsettling effect of variegation; it was used considerably by Miss Jekyll. She used the round blades of bergenias to contrast with the sword-shaped leaves of yuccas and day lilies, crinums and the rest. Both shrubs and herbaceous perennials can appear heavy in the mass but we have the constant uplift of the narrow grassy leaves of day lilies, pokers and irises. To these we will add the grasses, a class of plant into which we have yet to delve. They are available in every size: the tall pampas grass, Cortaderia selloana, in silvery cream or silvery-pink ('Rendat-leri') is only for the largest gardens, outdoing all but the cardoon and Macleaya in size. A more compact form is 'Pumila'.