Best Makeup Foundation

The West Coast, being a land of an ever thickening population, bids fair to become a nurseryman’s paradise, although a rather hectic one. Since climates and soil conditions change every hundred miles or less, there should be, and to a certain extent there already are, enough nurseries to match the climates. In the Northwest, where climates are comparatively uniform, the ratio between nurserymen and gardeners is pretty well balanced; in the Southwest it is slightly top-heavy with nurseries, and the San Francisco Bay region may be considered well supplied.

Nurseries in each of these sections generally handle the plants best adapted to their respective climates, but many gardeners living in other parts, where soil, atmosphere and temperatures do not jibe with these climates, must hunt about for plants suited to their gardens. This is what makes it difficult for some newcomers to the West to start off on the right foot.

After learning his local conditions and getting his hand used to them, the ambitious gardener is often seized with the urge to widen his horizon by trying something different – new plants or better forms of those he already grows. Then he turns to the specialists, a step which heightens his gardening joy and rewards hint with undreamed of colors and forms.

The specialists, thank goodness, have bounded ahead since the end of the war, and now, as well as iris, dahlia and primula nurseries, we have growers who devote all their energies to the best pansies, violets, violas, petunias, geraniums, and so on. This is doubly to the good, since few specialists can refrain from doing a bit of hybridizing, or at least improving by selection, and this leads to the average and inferior stock being supplanted by better forms and varieties.

Once the gardener gets his nose ‘pointed toward superior strains, there is no holding him back. He sends far and wide for catalogues and searches out nurseries and seed houses in states and countries with gardening conditions something like his own. The Northwesterner and the Californian living where fog is frequent send to England; the enthusiast in the Big Valley or in the foothills east of the Valley send to the Middle West or to the East. The lovely Spanish foxglove, Digitalis thapsi, and the dwarf Japanese Aquilegut akitensis have proved a great success in the foothills, and Valley gardeners delight in verbaseums with flowers in pastel shades, particularly V. blattaria and the color forms of V. phoeniceum.

The most exciting step is raising plants from seed which collectors send in from other countries. Trials of such seeds in my search for plants suitable for my summer-dry, winter-moist hillside have given me more pleasure than any other form of gardening and have contributed the greatest zest to my work with growing things.

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