Garden flowers in public places can be as rewarding as any wildflower display of the desert, range, or alpine meadow. A few municipalities have had excellent experience with flower beds and maintain many, relatively small, plantings of herbaceous flowering materials under continuous cultivation. Small beds, planted to one or two species, make quite impressive displays. Although maintenance of flower beds and herbaceous materials is somewhat more difficult and costly than that for trees and shrubs, some problems have been exaggerated. This report on three successive years of trials with 50 species at Davis provides additional details to other information already available on maintenance costs, species selection, planting date, density, and useful life of plantings.