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MY GROWING GARDEN

“§

PuatTE I. Excelsa rose: wonderful grower . . .
late.” (See page 93.)

MY GROWING
GARDEN

BY
J. HORACE McFARLAND

AUTHOR OF “‘GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH THE TREES”
‘* PHOTOGRAPHING FLOWERS AND TREES”
‘*PLANTING THE HOME GROUNDS”

ETC.

ILLUSTRATED WITH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR AND
ROBERT B. McFARLAND

dew Bork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Lrp.

1915

Corrnienut, 1915
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1915

Wount Pleasant Press
J. Horace McFarland Company
Harrisburg, Pa.

ys es

©o.4416018

Dedication

TO THE OTHER THREE
OF THE “FAMILY FOUR” WHO LIVE IN
THIS GROWING GARDEN

igs

fas

RE Mens
ae. ;

‘sale tl

”

PREFACE

OR many gardenless years I had been reading
of gardens, and not seldom seeing some of
them. The reading was mostly of the greater

gardens, the appearance of which more often
reflected the personal taste of the designer or the
gardener than the garden-love of the owner.
Indeed, the very sight of some gardens was irrita-
ting, because of their expensive elaboration.

In one notable instance, the great formal garden
I repeatedly visited contained no suggestion of its
owner, and I came to think of it in the name of the
soft-voiced Scotchman who kept it growing and
glowing. In another garden, of which I kept for
some time a photographic record, the owner was
unsympathetic, unrelated; he was doing a garden
as part of his spending job as a rich man.

But one garden that I saw told another story.
It had been started lovingly more than a gener-
ation before by a fine-spirited clergyman. With
his own hands he planted in it, and his daughter,
who lived in it when I visited it, was adding her
ideals to those of her father in that yet growing
garden. This seemed altogether worth while.

When it came my time to have a garden, it

(vii)

viii PREFACE

seemed right that my garden should grow in my
way, mainly by my own endeavor. Incidentally,
and fortunately, it also was necessary that it should
so grow, if at all, for financial reasons!

This garden—my garden, our garden—has
grown for a half-dozen years under these con-
ditions. It has been my golf, in pleasurable exer-
cise; it has been my open-air school, in what it
has taught me; it has been my physical regener-
ation from the debility of overwork.

It is only proper to mention the unusual con-
ditions surrounding the making of this book. I
have written it, but my family have lived it with
me, and the print-shop which bears my name and
enjoys my garden has made of the book much
more than a perfunctory item of work. The pub-
lishers, too, have let down all the bars, so that in
a very special sense the book has been lived,
written, designed, illustrated, printed, and bound
as the work of one man and those about him.
Whatever it is, therefore—and I am keenly con-
scious of its faults—it is mine, or ours; it is of the

man, the family, and the shop.
J. H. McF.
September 28, 1915

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGH

I. January: The Place and the Prospect .. 1
II. February: The Planning and the Catalogues 13

III. March: Getting into the Ground. . . . 27
IV. April: Planting of All Sorts, and Some
Results Vers oo 4 es AO

V. May: Spring Buds and Blooms ... . 69
VI. June: The Feast of Flowers . . . . . 87
VII. July: The Feast of Vegetables. . . . . 105

VIII. August: Sober Summer . .... . . 123
IX. September: Good Things to Eat—Fine
Mines tor see: Gay. 6 kod a ee 148

X. October: The Early Fall Glory . . . . 157
XI. In Between: Choosing Your Own Weeds . 173
XII. November: Putting the Garden to Sleep . 185
XIII. December: Retrospect and Prospect. . . 197
ins ee er

(ix)

= 2

ILLUSTRATIONS

COLORED PLATES

FACING
PAGH
Miberstrstenialon so 8 cs a 5, ae hee eae, al nSertion-cover
Excelsa rose: ‘‘A wonderful grower . . . it blooms late.” (1)
Frontispiece
“The forsythia . . . its yellow bells are shaking . . . At the

foot there blooms a crescent of Golden Spur narcissus.”” (X)

‘An ounce of Shirley poppy seed . . . sowed along an eighty-
foot border . . . in mid-June came days of poppy glory.”
(XVIII) Res ee pre Wea fe anion hac ee

“The giant zinnias are really gorgeous . . . The crescent border
. glows with their stately flowers.” (XXIX)

SEPIA PLATES

“The great old sycamore showed greater with the snow about it.”
WM re ee a crea eK aN bk Se ag. Moe cg

“The marvelous elasticity of the arborvites under a great load of
clinging whiteness.” (III)

“One winter day of hoar-frost . . . the delicacy of the twigs of
the young linden.” (IV) Sete ees Ss

“A carriage approach from the west.” ... “My son has
acquired a pair of ski.” (V).

‘A rain that froze around every twig . . . showed how beautiful
the Thunberg barberry hedge can become when it blooms in
erystal.”’ (VI)

“March is passing . . . The crocuses are likely to pop open
suddenly.”’ (VII) sites eae

(xi)

. 156

xii ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING
PAGH

“Tree surgery .. . This tree was the ‘sickest’... now
growing most vigorously and happily.” (VIII) . . . . 53

“April is a daffodil month . . . The driveway crescent border
glows now in Emperor.” (IX) . . . . . . . . 60

“In a warm April rain . . . under the Norway maple at the
westiend.” (XD) je es ee es

“The loveliness of the horse-chestnut’s foot-long panicle.’”’ (XII) 72

“The apple blooms . . . the spraying game.”’ (1) Not open; too
soon. (11) Wide open, not fertilized; too soon. (11) Calyx
open and relaxed; just right for spraying. (Iv) Calyx yet open;
still right. (XIII)... Pan etn i.e 77

“The axis walk a wonder of os sa foliage ... eine a
picture vista.” (XIV): 2 7 0 a a

“A gracious wealth of bloom on . . . this same blackberry row.”

CV) ai esl ee
Leuchstern rose: . . . “its bloom has been copious, exquisite,

enduring.” (XVID) oo ey, ce
The rose hedge in June: Lady Gay on left, oe American

Beauty onright. (XVII) . .. . Ra ey ay. SE

Iris: ‘‘The unique and delightful Japanese sort.”? (XIX) . . 100

“The Japanese honeysuckle . . . has flung its branches and

tendrils over a tree-stump.” (XX) . . . . . . . 104
“A garden of vegetables is a beautiful thing, if it is a good garden.”

(.0.6 OR Ree eure UA NS aan Rate Me ee 5 a UE
“Consider the hollyhock; how it grows!” an Mie cas Soi)
‘‘At the beginning of the month the great rhododendron is in full

bloom.”’ CX XUN) 5 ee eee aad

‘““My dwarf fruit trees have grown more than generously.” (XXIV) 124

“The China asters . . . especially the King sorts that reign
over the border along the axis walk.” (XXV) . . . . 128

The formal garden in August. (KXVI) . . . . . - . 182

ILLUSTRATIONS xii

FACING

“One of the pear trees flattened out against the espalier ae FACE
onit .. . some beautiful fruits.” (XXVIID .. . . 141

“The ‘white snakeroot’ . . . the absurd common name to
Eupatorium ageratoides.’””’ (XXVIII) Prana nee ne ial ahh Oe

“The stately .. . Japanese anemones are at their best.”
Ore a te is ae hah gen ee che aon eo oe cD

“Celery just humping itself these cool nights.” (XXXII). . . 168
‘‘Sunday-school girls, mostly from gardenless homes . . . delight

PPIBUNCTHOMETS:, (CRMC LD) aio 6 in et eds: We tenes LTO
“The long border of nicotiana and African marigold . . . is now

MMBEELEC LION: @ OOO ELD) gi cs Se te es te Se LOO
“On either side the garden entrance a fine red cedar.”” (XXXIV) 193
“The barberry hedge, now purely lovely . .. The thododen-

drons, snow-bound, look happy.” (XXXV) . Bei oe on reeeaes DUO)
“The fruit-garden, looking clean and trim . . . The rose-arbor

. thick with this clinging snow.” (XXXVI) ei tens ee ZOOS

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Puate II. “The great old sycamore showed greater with the snow

about it.’’ (See page 11.)

MY GROWING GARDEN

CHAPTER I—JANUARY
THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT

CTUALLY, we—that means the family four

of us—are to have a real outdoor garden!

Not a “handkerchief”? garden, in a white-

fenced, shaded back yard, such as has mocked us

for nearly twenty years, but a garden with borders,

and beds, and walks, and maybe a sundial; to

say nothing of a possible lily-pond, a longed-for

rose-hedge, a dreamed-of orchard of dwarf fruit
trees.

And it has happened suddenly, too, this garden
prospect. Tired of the close-by asphalted street,
wearied of the twenty hours of trolley cars that
banged past every five minutes not forty feet from
our very ears as we went through the motions of
sleep, we were looking abroad for the place of our
dreams—a garden place. Twice our hopes of a
half-acre had been shattered; first by the sheer
cruelty of the hard-hearted real-estate man’s price-
demand, when we found that old apple orchard

A (1)

4 MY GROWING GARDEN

next the park; and again when our two friends had
declined to settle with us away from immediate
gas and electricity, from the city mail delivery
and the water main.

Then came the sight of the little place, not at
all the garden-place of our dreams, but a “prac-
ticable’”’ lot of sixty-five feet front in a pleasant
neighborhood, on which we might at least have a
little room outside the home walls. Inquiry of a
friendly real-estate man as to values followed, and
also, glory be! his suggestion that we “look at the
old H place.”’

Look we did, and we foul that dull Novem-
ber day, a tangle of tall grass and taller weeds,
drifted leaves, dead pear trees and a dingy-looking
old “‘mansion-house.” But also there were pines
and hemlocks about, splendid maples and horse-
chestnuts, and a glorious old giant of a sycamore.
A long arborvitze hedge—several hedges, in fact—
rambled across the place, near the slope on which
had fallen from their trellises old, old grape-vines,
relics of a famous vineyard.

Somber was the look of things outdeem that
day, and worse indoors—but this is not a house
story. I had “the surprise of my life’ when the
two ladies of the family, smelling the sweet odors of
the autumn foliage, feeling the touch of wet hem-

THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT 3

lock boughs as they walked about under the
drooping evergreens, agreed that this was right
for a home, regardless of what might be inside those
shuttered French windows. The outdoors had
called, and we, city-tired, were answering accord-
ing to our blood.

I have often thought, since, of that first day,
and of the good fortune that was ours in coming to
“the place’ under the most depressing conditions,
in the worst weather of that season which Bryant
—who must have had mental malaria at times—
calls melancholy. Melancholy! We couldn’t find
reason then, nor have we ever found reason since,
for melancholia concerning the passage of any of
the seasons here at Breeze Hill. Even that first
winter was certainly a season of loveliness. Never
a day but brought its own beauty in the trees, of
sky and cloud, even of rain and fog, of frost and
wind. The snow was always making pictures for
us, on the pines and hemlocks, along the hedges
and plants; and the occasional sleet outlined more
completely the loveliness and the symmetry of the
tree twigs.

And if I may exercise the writer’s privilege of
sudden change of time, I can say now, after a half-
dozen growing-garden years, that spring and sum-
mer are each a new joy, each always better than

ch MY GROWING GARDEN

any other season ever was until the insensible pas-
sage into the “melancholy” autumn sets us tingling
with color joy in the happy maturity of leaves
and twigs, and shows us nature’s color balance
of warmth for winter and “coolth” for summer.
Then we are sure that autumn is the best of all.
We see how the honeysuckle holds its glossy green
robe right through the frosts which bring down
the golden shower of horse-chestnut leaves; we
enjoy the berry brightness on the dogwoods and
the persistence of the chrysanthemums; we watch
the thermometer leaves of the big rhododendrons,
and we have learned to pick out the promise of
those fat, sumptuous buds on the lilacs, the for-
sythias, the deutzias and spireas, that are all
ready for the spring show, not so many weeks
ahead. Melancholy? We don’t see it, or feel it, or
know it, here at Breeze Hill, in this growing
garden.

Now I’ve named it, though it was my much
better half who did it first. It is the right name,
for we are on a hill, and surely the breezes that
reach us come straight from the distant mountains,
not often touching the rising smoke and dust of
the city a hundred feet lower. At first, we had a
whimsical reason for the name, in that a change
of but its first letter would be required to make it

THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT 5

fit the arctic predictions of our city-bound friends.
But it has never been “‘Freeze Hill!”

This is to be a story of the growing garden, and
it begins in the month of first possession, the
snowy Christmas month. What is the place, and
what the prospect?

The place had been rather aptly described to us
as “two acres of San José scale with a house
attached.” In addition to the scale, there were in
sight weeds, and weeds, and more weeds, but now
the snow has made flowers of their aftermath. Of
garden there is nothing, and the street plan upon
which access depends predicates grading that will
probably mean much raw soil, scantily arable.
The trees are noble, but neglected and dilapidated.
There are no walks save those that will have to be
changed, and back of a great old arborvite hedge
are the fallen ruins of a greenhouse and an ice-
house—which we cannot hope to restore.

One or two Norway maples that had been
planted have, through years of neglect, established
everywhere thousands of their seedlings from an
inch to twenty feet in height, sometimes sucking
dry and killing portions of the great evergreen
hedge, and sometimes just impudently declaring
an intention to entirely possess the land. The
once fine old pear orchard is dead, dead, of San

6 MY GROWING GARDEN

José scale, save only two trees. The tremendous
old lilacs have been mutilated for their flowering
branches every spring of untenancy by the law-
less, and are as well thickly coated with another
no less hateful parasite, the oyster-shell scale; but
they are alive! There are gnarled quinces that
look as if fruit could not come, and the nearly
as much gnarled grape-vines that make up the
most of the planted growth are said to be rich in
- root-knot, and to be worthless. Where I dug into
the soil before frost sealed it, I found little depth
of ground fit for a garden above the heavy shale
that characterizes this neighborhood.

Here and there a pipe, or a stump, or a heap of
stones denotes some long-gone feature of the
mansion-house surroundings. Several great locusts
tower near the foundation remains of the burned
barn. There must have been some sort of a foun-
tain here in front of the house, and there remain
several forlorn old terra-cotta vases on wobbly
foundations. Of the seven horse-chestnuts that
too closely environ the house, six are more or less
decayed as a consequence of splitting. The two
branches into which each main stem was permitted
to separate thirty-five years ago have not had
strength to hold against the snow-loads, and a
little crack in the crotch has widened until it

THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT 7

is now a serious opening, which may probably
mean decay in the trunk. |

Discouraging, all this? Not at all; for here
are these same trees that time has matured into dig-
nified beauty and efficient shelter; here is such a
varied contour, such a succession of natural divi-
sions by tree and hedge and house and approach,
that the relative largeness of the place is at once
apparent, or, to be honestly accurate, was apparent
not to my desk-dulled eyes, but to the acute
vision of my landscape-engineer friend, who early
came to look at my purchase and quickly saw how
very big were these particular two acres, and
what they might become as a garden. He saw
that the natural vertical axis of the place was
through the selected living-room of the house and
along the center of the garden-to-be, and that a
horizontal axis could readily be created at a proper
intersection. He it was who gave me courage to
cut away some trees that the better ones might
be yet better, and whose own great skill suggested
the development which has made the new plant-
ings fit the old trees and shrubs so that maturity
has seemed to go right along with that same
planting.

I have had very many reasons to be thankful
for friends, and none more potent than for the

8 MY GROWING GARDEN

friendly professional aid of a man whose mind and
heart are so full of the glory of the land and what
grows on it that he plants garden poems and builds
park epics right along. And I have, too, reason to
pity the unfortunates who try to make a garden
home by the T-square method, or who have it
‘sent in” ready made, without any clear ideal of
developing the individuality that every bit of
God’s green earth can hold. Both a home and a
garden, and much more a garden-home like Breeze
Hill, deserve the better treatment of individual
thought, preferably aided by consultation with a
good landscape architect, or engineer, or designer,
or whatever these fine men call themselves. And
any such place will reward its owner who loves it
and patiently works with it; reward him with a
true garden individuality all its own.

If this may be done, there will be less tiresome
- monotony and less thoughtless duplication of
plants. Gardens will not be mere repetitions of
hydrangea and golden glow, but will show the
taste and knowledge and ideals of the makers of
them. |

It may easily be seen, by now, that I am plan-
ning for a garden that shall be my own, in the
sense of ideals; but that shall also be saved by
reliance upon skilled advice from the errors I might

“The marvelous elasticity of the arborvi

reat load of el

Puate IIT.

tes under a

ing whiteness.” (See page 10.)

ing

o
So

THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT 9

make. It needs also to be made apparent to the
reader that my growing garden is not to grow on
gold, of which I have little, but rather on my own
growth into that real garden knowledge which is
found only with the spade and the rake, and
amongst the seeds and plants and bulbs and roots
and vines of American hardiness. My readers,
therefore, may expect to find confession of defi-
ciencies and failures, and of difficulties due to the
lack of funds to rapidly accomplish my ambitions.
They will have little trouble, I think, in perceiving
that I now regard the failures and the lack of funds
as blessings not at all disguised, because they have
caused me to get more health, happiness and “‘fun”’
out of my garden hours, and to make my garden’s
growth more precious to me and mine. It is surely
true in growing a garden that there is a far greater
reward to the worker who personally strives for a
result, eyes open to nature’s wonderful ways of
doing things, than is possible to be had by one
who has merely waved the fairy wand of wealth,
with a presto! but not worked-for result. Indeed,
it is seemingly almost as hard for just money to
make a garden that is home-like as it was for that
camel of long ago to thread himself through the
allegorical needle!

Those early winter days, when I exped from

10 MY GROWING GARDEN

the call of the carpenters who were renewing the
old house, gave me vast benefit. I knew about
snow, of course—had I not shoveled my own side-
walk part of the time for a score of years? But I
had forgotten some of the snow-happenings about
my boyhood’s garden home, so that the marvelous
elasticity of the seemingly stiff arborvites under
a great load of clinging whiteness was new to me,
as I waded about, lifting here and shaking there
to see the branches spring to position as released
from their snow burden.

Twenty years of walking on city streets gave
me no preparation for the sheer beauty of the
walk through a foot of virgin snow, with the after-
noon sun sending blue sky-shadows into every
footprint. The outlining in snow of the lovely
reverse curves of the branches on the western big
horse-chestnut showed me anew what tree archi-
tecture means.

I made acquaintance, one winter day of hoar-
frost, with the delicacy of the twigs of the sturdy
young linden, and with the green plumes of the
Norway spruce nearby. Curiously enough, I
passed without seeing it a fine persimmon, which
I presume was loaded then as it has been since
with delicious fruit. Those same scraggly quinces
which looked so forlorn in November took on a

THE PLACE AND THE PROSPECT 11

new possibility when their branches were cased in
crystal, for no fruiting could more completely
justify their existence.

And the great old sycamore showed greater
with the snow about it than it had when leaves
instead carpeted the ground. Those days indeed
gave me the prospect of the growing garden, while
they showed me the loveliness of the snow garden
that came into bloom in a night. The open space
about—how it stirred me! I would—and did—
shout for the joy of it all, and no one looked on me
as insane; while had I raised my voice half so loud
in rejoicing on the twenty-foot lot of my street-
front home, some astonished neighbor might prop-
erly have telephoned for a policeman, or set on
foot rumors of doubt as to my life-long abstinence
from alcohol.

So I face this January the garden prospect. The
items are as they have been above set down, but
may be here summarized as including perhaps
twenty fine trees, some hundreds of feet of old
arborvite hedges, some scores of ancient grape-
vines, some half-dozen great old lilacs, some slopes
of weedy land, a flat expanse of raw and seemingly
barren shale. The incidental detriments of broken-
down outbuildings, and the interloping bushes
and misplaced trees that had prospered during

12 MY GROWING GARDEN

years of neglect, may be disregarded. The scanty
pocket-book that had to stand for the prospects
ahead cannot be disregarded; it is to be care-
fully conserved, so that it may answer imperative
demands for garden necessities. There is a hope
that the things we may grow to eat on this land
will make possible an occasional transfer from the
household account to the garden budget.

Lest I forget, the shape of the place must be
here set down: it is almost exactly a quarter-circle
of a radius of four hundred feet. In my joy I call
it my Breeze Hill piece of pie! And it slopes
gently toward the south and east and west from
the noble clump of Norway spruces that hold off
much of the fierceness of winter’s storms.

The place and a little of the prospect are before
us, to work out in the months of the years that
God gives us.

CHAPTER TI—FEBRUARY
THE PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES

HIS fine February day—a day of white sky
over the white snow, of a clear cold that
has just a hint of the growing strength of

the sun back of it—I found “Old William” deftly
working fruit off the upper branches of that per-
simmon tree I had not noticed at all the first
winter of acquaintance with Breeze Hill. The old
man had spliced together two long clothes-props,
and with the uplifted end he could tickle off the
wrinkled persimmons that were by now surely free
from any astringency. The sight tempted me, and
my younger legs were good for the simple climb
that took me up where I could pick, eat and truly
enjoy a fruit which to most Americans who live
in the northern states is merely a tradition of
their boyhood.

I have been wondering why the hybridizers
have not worked some of the size and mildness of
the big Japanese “‘kaki’’ into this delicious morsel
of the north, and the inquiry born of that wonder
is answered to the purport that the much larger

(13)

14 MY GROWING GARDEN

Nipponese fruit seemingly will not mix or “‘cross”’
or hybridize with our native persimmon. It is not
recorded that Burbank has ever tried to bring
together these two fruits in a union that easily
might produce a result of great economic value;
but then Burbank has not done much that is of
any real use to any climate outside of California,
and the spectacular seems to appeal to him much
more strongly than the useful. Sometime, how-
ever, the union will be made, and we shall have a
fruit somewhat larger than this shapeless mass of
juicy pulp I am eating, with, let us hope, at least
a portion of its exquisite wild tang.

There are two of the persimmon trees, but only
one has fruited. Both have the distinct habit of
the genus so clearly outlined in even these trees
that are probably not over twenty-five years old,
and which in the years of their maturity will make
them splendidly effective.

I have discovered another treasure not far
from the persimmons—a fine, shapely mulberry,
surely old enough to bear. Truly my growing
garden has surprises!

But now is the time for garden planning, so
that later we may plant with order and certainty.
While the hedges and the paths impose certain
lines, in general the garden may be what we like.

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 15

This liking must be modified, however, to what
my check-book will properly back up with cash.
Therefore, and certainly, some things will not be
there! My dream has not included great exotic
rhododendrons like those at Wellesley, nor has it
compassed the lovely magnolias I would be glad
to see blooming among these evergreens, and in
contrast to their solid color.

But I can have dogwoods and red-buds, and
they are going to be planted where I can see them
against the green of the high hedge of old arbor-
vites. Then I will eventually come to see in the
May time a home bit of the exquisite picture that
I have often visited along the almost unknown
Conodoguinet creek, where God certainly planted
a garden, good enough for any Adam, in or out of
Eden. And nearby, also with the evergreen back-
ground, there must be some more of that same
slope of the Conodoguinet, in bits of Phlox dwari-
cata, Mertensia virginica, Dutchman’s breeches,
bloodroot, May-apple and the other friends of
my spring rambles. Perhaps I may even compass
some of the great trillium, that woods aristocrat,
which vies with the cotton flower of the South in
its change of color in the same bloom, from purest
white to a lovely blush-pink as the days mature it.

There will be other shrubs, of course, so that I

16 MY GROWING GARDEN

may have a succession of bloom all through the
spring and summer. Certain old flower friends
must meet me in the garden, but its invisible gate
shall be barred against that gross hydrangea, the
flowers of which hang on until the once white
panicles blush into dirty pink and turn a corpse-
like green, and which is planted as if it was the
only shrub available in America. I will have
hydrangeas, but the worth-while ones only—the
~plam paniculata and the oak-leaved one; the
beautiful radiata, with its leaves silvered beneath;
and the showy form of arborescens which loves
half-shade and blooms early.

I shall prefer for admission here the native
shrubs, and especially those native to Pennsyl-
vania. Of course it will not do to overlook some
of the fine exotics that the plant-collectors have
sent us from over the seas, particularly from Japan
and China, like certain snowballs and spireas; but
I want the home place to reflect the home state.
Those dogwoods and red-buds will be of ““Penn’s
Woods,” surely enough; and the great old syca-
more which distinguishes the place is a native tree,
naturally planted. The arborvites belong to the
Atlantic coast, and these white pines and hem-
locks are of the hills and valleys of this state,
reminiscent to me of my summer home at lovely

Puatre IV. “One winter day of hoar-frost . . . the delicacy of
the twigs of the young linden.” (See page 10.)

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 1

Eagles Mere, with its grandly beautiful primeval
forest.

The Norway spruces are not of America, and
here they show it; for the older trees are becoming
bedraggled, as might be expected when they are
called upon to endure the vicissitudes of a climate
with a variation of over a hundred degrees in
annual temperature, instead of the lesser variations
of the central European hills from whence it comes.
These dominating horse-chestnuts, however, can
hardly be happier on their own native Grecian
slopes than they are here, or more beautiful in
bloom; wherefore it may be that the leaf-dropping
trees stand the change to America better than
those we call evergreen.

Most of us, familiar as we are from early child-
hood with its spring sweetness, consider the com-
mon lilac as belonging to America, of course.
Instead, we owe it to Bulgaria; and the many
“improved” varieties of it are of French origin,
while other and quite different lilacs come from
various parts of Asia, with none at all native to
America. The big, rugged, picturesque old lilac
clumps at Breeze Hill may therefore remind me
of the Balkans, if I can for a moment forget the
similar plants that were a lovely feature at my old
home along the Susquehanna.

*18 MY GROWING GARDEN

But I want here in this garden more of the
Pennsylvania good things that bloom; just as I
should, I hope, prefer to have an Ohio garden, if I
lived in that state of presidents, or a Massachusetts
‘ garden if I inhabited that very particular form of
existence. I often wonder why people will con-
tinually plant monkey gardens, imitating some-
thing from somewhere else! I have seen the
futile struggle for blue-grass lawns in Fort Worth,
with the richly velvety Bermuda grass belonging
comfortably there; and I have been angered at the
folly of transplanting Newport and Bar Harbor to
St. Augustine and Miami in the gardens provided
around the hotels for the painfully rich. My dis-
position, therefore, for a home-state garden here
is rooted in odious comparisons.

I see places here for some native rhododendrons
and some laurels from our hillsides; and I am
hoping these can be invited within my price range,
for they will not be so financially repellent as the
haughty hybrids “made in Belgium.” The soil of
this garden is without any limestone character,
and if I can gather or get some.of nature’s compost
or “‘leaf-mold,”’ I ought to be able to have some-
thing worth while in these ericaceous plants,
“collected”? from the woods. Parenthetically, I
wish’ the catalogue men would tell what they

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 19

know about soils, when a plant they sell will simply
die in ground uncongenial to it.

There are on the place some plants of the native
elder, a lovely though neglected shrub, esteemed
more for its shining black berries than for its
broad cymes of creamy white flowers, which come
between spring and summer. So I will have this
relative of the native viburnums or snowballs to
start a collection with, that I hope will in good
time give me bloom nearly from frost to frost,
twig colors to brighten the winter days as well, and
that will make my garden grow into a live and
changing museum of the flora of Pennsylvania.

Of course roses are to be in, and of, and about,
this garden; and I’ll have to accept many not native
to America. A rose-hedge about the whole place
I wanted, but I have been word-persuaded and
pocket-convinced that I was wrong. There will
be a rose-fence, to separate two parts of the
“formal” garden, south of the long arborvite
hedge; and I see ahead a rose-arbor built of the
completely weathered and long-enduring locust
posts that the passing vineyard has left about the
place. Rose-borders there must be, and I surely
will have the great Rugosa hybrids that are
pointing the way to a new race of rugged ever-
bloomers.

20 MY GROWING GARDEN

This old mansion-house was the operating
center of a farm of hundreds of acres, and could
afford an encircling road about the home. But
now with only two acres, such a road would bite
too deeply into the lawn that must give repose
and dignity to the house. A carriage approach
from the new street on the west is therefore part
of Mr. Manning’s plan, and I have been staking
it out these February days, finding the ground
unfrozen under the snow that has given us days
of good sleighing.

A February variation has appeared to my
husky son, who has acquired a pair of skees, or
more precisely ski, on which at first he tumbled
entertainingly, but with which now he skims the
new-fallen snow, and scales the hills which give us
a changing vista each day. And while my fifty-
year bones are not ski-inclined, I am rejoiced that
by proxy I am thus freed from the trammels of
street and sidewalk, because we are in and
growing a garden.

To hurry our sight of flowers in spring we have
placed a modest coldframe in a sheltered spot,
where in these sunny February days we get a
glimpse now and then of a violet, and see the
readiness to grow of the pansies, campanulas, fox-
gloves and other carried-over perennials. We have

pea

Puate V. “A carriage approach from the west.” . . . “My son
has acquired a pair of ski.”” (See page 20.)

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 21

been anticipating spring, too, by cutting some
twigs off the great old forsythia bushes, which
after two or three days in the water-filled vases,
and in a dark place, and two weeks more in what-
ever sunshine we have—yet in the vases, of course
—are shaking their golden bells for us, just as
brightly as their outdoor sister twigs will do in
mid-April. It is a pleasant foretaste of the spring
feast of flowers, and easily obtained.

Even in January the catalogues called to me,
and now I know I must settle down to conclusions,
so that orders may go to the seedsmen and the
plantsmen whose aid we invoke. This catalogue
lure is an old one, but it is a perennial surprise
that I should never acquire immunity to it. As
may without much difficulty be ascertained, I
print catalogues for a living, and thus I truly live
with them every work-day in the year. Just now
I am in thankfulness that the recurrent push to
have the seedsmen satisfied in January has been
met; yet I turn to the pages of these books, as
some of them are, with as much garden zest as if
I had not worried for months to get them ready.
It is, I suppose, a sort of automatic change of
personality that happens, when I cease to see the
catalogue as a printer and begin to gloat over its
offerings as a garden maker.

22 MY GROWING GARDEN

So now comes the delightful difficulty of it all!
I want everything new and fine that is offered; but
I know quite well that I have neither room nor
reason for all these “‘novelties.”” And also I know
as well that not all of them will turn out in my
garden exactly as they are described; which is, I
presume, one of-the best reasons in the world for
adventuring into the trial of them. It is a fasci-
nating gamble, a fair game of chance; and even if I
draw less prizes than I hope for, I shall have had
the anticipation of prizes and the satisfaction of
trying for them. So it is, paraphrasing in my
garden philosophy, better to have tried and lost
than never to have tried at all. In fact, I am sure
to win something, even if the sweet peas are not
so many inches across, the petunias so wonderfully
blotched, the asters larger than a respectable chry-
santhemum, and if those phenomenal South African
annuals fail to germinate at all.

Just here there comes into sight an advantage
I possess that accounts in part for the drawing
power of these annually recurring novelties that
are thus so alluringly offered in the front pages of
the catalogues. I know how some novelties, at
least, happen, and why these are thus for sale. My
acquaintance with these honestly hopeful gentle-
men of the seed-stores has not in a generation

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 23

served to give me doubt of their good faith. Con-
sider, for instance, this new celery that one seeds-
man is exploiting as better than “the best ever.”
It happens that I am acquainted with the acute
and successful market-gardener who selected this
“sport” in a field of good celery, watched it, grew
it to seedage, planted it again and again, with
renewed selections toward a high ideal, evolving
at last a “type,” or “strain,” of celery quite
definitely better than anything that had preceded
it in his experience. Why should I doubt the
truth of the claims made in the catalogue of the
seedsman who is eager to pass on a better celery
to his customers?

Then I call to mind the keen discrimination of
that fine old Scotch gardener who had been select-
ing for years the softest and clearest colors, and the
longest spurs, on the columbines he was growing
in a mighty expensive garden near Boston. Why
shouldn’t that strain of columbine be better, as
offered on the catalogue-pages of the seedsman
who gave him a market for the results of his skill,
and whose own prosperity depends on continued
confidence?

There comes to mind another of these bits of
inside knowledge concerning the ways of the seeds-
man ‘This particular man does not love novelties

Q4 MY GROWING GARDEN

of the foreign sort, but he believes that rigid and
thoughtful selection toward a high ideal is sure to
bring about improvements that are worth while
in standard sorts of vegetables. So all summer
he travels to where his seed-crops are growing—
and they are planted where they grow best to
uniform excellence—in order that he may cull and
cut out, or “rogue” in the trade phrase, every
plant not up to his exacting standard. If he is
wrong, so was Darwin; but I believe in both.

When I first began to photograph things that
grow in the ground, I took what was really a
beautiful picture of a certain radish to a veteran
seedsman—a great old man whose years had been
spent in searching always for the best. He saw
no beauty in the photograph, because, as he ex-
plained to me, the tazls of the radishes were entirely
too “coarse.” Think of refined radish tails, Mr.
Doubter-of-Seedsmen, and realize just how, by
a lifetime’s interest in selecting so that the flesh
would get into the radish and out of the tails, it
has come about that you are served at breakfast
with delicious little globes, or ovals, or thick
pencils, of fresh pungency.

Grass is Just grass, of course, to most of us; yet
another of these discriminating seedsmen has been
considering otherwise for a generation. He knows

PLANNING AND THE CATALOGUES 25

each little blade or plant in your lawn separately,
and when he has dug up a spoonful of your soil,
he knows why you have or haven’t a good lawn,
and how you can have one. To him, a bag of
mixed grass seed is a whole dictionary, and he can
read the hieroglyphics of it. Why should I doubt
his word as to any grass proposition?

Now most of the flower-seed “novelties”? come
from Europe, and those old Germans and French-
men have been doing such things plus for hundreds
of years. Of course they make mistakes—nearly
everyone does except you and I, gentle reader—
but they try not to; and when an improved plant
comes over the Atlantic, it has been sent, almost
invariably, because the master seedsman was sure
it was better.

So I’m no doubting Thomas on the “novelties.”
Some of them will not do well with me, because
the conditions are unfavorable, or because I do
not know how to guide aright their growth. Yet
enough will do well to make the experiment worth
while; and all the while I have the fun and the
anticipation, which are at least sixty per cent of
the game. |

Therefore, I knowingly and gladly submit to
the lure of the catalogues, selecting such standard
sorts and such novelties as look best to my sanguine

26 MY GROWING GARDEN

eyes. That I usually buy and sow two to ten
times as many kinds and plants as I can at all find
room for is no sort of fault or harm, for I can give
away plants even more happily than the nicotinist
gives away a cigar, and with as much heart-
warming thankfulness coming my way. I have
given life, to grow, in good fortune, to continuing
beauty or tasteliness; while the cigar, already dead,
has to be cremated to afford a brief pleasure.

I find that I have been buying each February
for this growing garden something like a hundred
packets of seeds. I always intend to get less; but
so long as these catalogues are alphabetical, and I
must go right through from aquilegia to zinnia,
from asparagus to witloof, I am likely to fall by
the wayside, and linger in the varieties of annuals
and perennials, and peas and corn. What harm?
I get flowers, vegetables, knowledge, fun!

In February just a few things ought to get going,
after these fine fat little packets have been parcel-
posted to me. I shall hope to realize the early
bloom of the Margaret carnations this year by
February sowing. Just how, the garden-book
reminders and the catalogues will tell me; I’m
not intending to transcribe here any directions
that are better had elsewhere.

CHAPTER II—MARCH
GETTING INTO THE GROUND
ie this middle-states location, March as a

spring month is not an entire success. Its

early days are likely to be as wintry as the
coldest February, and it is safer to expect a blizzard
than a zephyr any time. Yet there is something of
spring to be noted, even when deep frost holds
the ground from the spade, and while the furnace
yet yawns for the few remaining shovelfuls of the
coal supply that was so surely to last the winter
through. ;

Look at the upturning tips of the horse-chestnut
twigs, and note there a shiny, smooth coating over
the fat terminal buds that may even be sticky to
the touch—if you can touch it. If you had looked
in February, you would have seen just the same
buds, but not so shiny-sticky, and not quite so
large. They are preparing for the spring Jump.

The lilac buds also are worth close inspection.
They, too, are fat and plump, where they are to
be flowers rather than leaves; and, while they have
been plump all winter, they are just a bit softer,

(27)

28 MY GROWING GARDEN

looser, and seemingly riper. They are ready as
well for the impending event—the whole joyous
resurrection that makes a northern spring some-
thing so luxuriant, so sweet, that the visitor from
a supposedly more flowerful clime, like California
or Florida, exclaims in astonishment.

But it is not yet spring—it is March, in this
latitude the least genial, the least pleasing, the
most capricious month of all the year. Usually
nothing can be done in the ground during the first
three weeks of this windy twelfth of the calendar,
save to sometimes look over and stake out the
garden. Indeed, any time the month and nature
may combine to tell me that winter is not over and
gone. One day of a later March than the first at
Breeze Hill, after a light snowfall, there came a rain
that froze around every limb and twig, and that
in particular showed me how exquisitely beautiful
the Thunberg barberry hedge can become when it
blooms in crystal. This hedge, by the way, is the
finest year-round thing on the place, for it is never
lacking in interest. This frozen sleet has also em-
phasized the dainty structure of that fine linden
along the axis walk.

There is, however, plenty to do, despite the
snow and sleet, while the ground remains so
frozen as to bear a wagon. The substance that is

‘

Puate VI. “A rain that froze around every twig . . . showed
how beautiful the Thunberg barberry hedge can become
when it blooms in crystal.’”’ (See page 28.)

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 29

to help this poor ground, this newly graded shale,
to produce flowers and fruits and vegetables, can
now be handily placed on the land. This is an
excellent time for manure hauling and spreading.

When I faced the first spring on the barren
acres of Breeze Hill I did not at all realize the
problem of fertilization, nor did I even know what
it meant to put humus in the ground. I bought
two or three two-horse loads of slightly rotted
stable manure, and thought I was well started!

Now I know that this hungry land, full of
willingness to work for me, cannot so work unless
it is fed, and well fed, and then fed some more.
So I am always on the lookout for manure, to be
taken any time I can get it, and to be piled for
rotting if it cannot be at once put on the land.
One spring the man [ hired to do some plowing got
disgusted and quit because I insisted on having
him plow deeper than the three or four inches he
thought sufficient, and because, as he expressed
it, “There ain’t no sense in plowin’ manure out
when I’m tryin’ to plow it in!’ He was getting
into contact with the covering of manure turned
under in the late fall, and which he thought
ought to be ample.

I have heard various stories about putting too
much manure into the land, but I have never seen

30 MY GROWING GARDEN

that land, nor have I yet seen anyone who has
seen it. As nearly as I can manage it now, I put
on, and dig in, and plow in and down, all the
manure I can obtain, about twice a year, with the
result of beginning to see that the ground is happy
and productive. It is not too rich, nor nearly
rich enough, and I think the available manure
supply and my ability to obtain a reasonable por-
tion of it will for a long time prevent the calamity

of over-richness here!

At first, as I have said, a little manure went a
great way, and it did little for the land. I know
now that I need to trench or dig over to at least a
foot in depth every inch of land that is to grow
vegetables, and to supply very nearly two feet of
fertile facility for flower-borders and beds. About
all the early six-inch preparation of those first
years has been gone over by now, adding manure
lavishly, and removing, or breaking up the hard —
shale substratum.

And I have used considerable dynamite to
loosen this heavy shale bottom. It appears that if
the shale is broken up, and any sort of humus
admitted, either of manure or of plant roots, the
strong, basic fertility of the soil is unlocked, so
that fine growth results. One plot was sub-soiled
by digging holes about eight feet apart and two

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 31

feet deep, and in these holes driving down another
two feet a bar that made room in each for a half-
stick of forty per cent dynamite, which when
exploded shook apart the shale without throwing
any of it out. There was thus provided room for
water and root action, and both are needed.

What I have written as to using manure freely
must be read as applying to my problem, which is
by no means what some other garden-growers may
have to face. I am writing of how fertility has
been applied to and unlocked from this rough
and long-neglected shale soil. I have seen happy
gardeners working on soil—deep, black, rich—that
made me envious, until I realized how much more
fun I was having.

That first spring the smell of the trash bre wae
constantly about Breeze Hill. I sorrow to think
of the potential fertility 1 foolishly burned, in
raked-up leaves and grass, in gathered weeds and
vegetable refuse. No such wastefulness occurs
now. Every leaf, every weed, every bit of lawn
clipping, every scrap of vegetable waste, goes into
the muck-pile, there to be wet and turned, and
then again wet and turned, at least six times in a
year. Any March snow is heaped over this muck-
pile and, if it is unfrozen, intermixed with it. Last
spring I had the satisfaction of seeing the year-old

32 MY GROWING GARDEN

pile worked through an inch-mesh screen, giving
me aremainder of soft, rich black earth, the much-
to-be-desired “leaf-mold,’? which is greatly com-
mended by gardeners for many things, and which
is most helpful when mixed into this lumpy shale
at Breeze Hill.

I bought some leaf-mold three years ago, in
which to plant certain rhododendrons from the
woods. It cost me, delivered on the place, $4.15
per cubic yard, which puts a value on the product
of my muck-pile, that product being exactly as
good as the purchased article. That muck-pile,
by the way, can rightly be termed, instead, a soil
factory; for it has taken shape so that at one end
the lovely, soft “‘black dirt’’ can be screened out,
while at the other end are accumulating leaves,
weeds, stems and all forms of soft and not woody
vegetable waste.

If any reader of these words takes weariness at
details of manure and muck, let him thereby know
that for him a garden will never really grow, in the
true sense! It is to me worth while to see nature’s
prodigality in leaf and stem and succulent plant
body returned to the earth that gave it, enriched
with the precious nitrogen taken from the air; and
no less a joy to see animal excrement rot down into
black humus, the finest of all fertilizers. And to

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 33

get these substances into the waiting ground in
late March, ahead of the April rains, is no small
part of the garden pleasure, because my imagi-
nation carries along the unseen sight of the chemical
processes that are going on in the land, conserving
waste, unlocking fertility, holding moisture in
ready shape, and increasing the power of the
earth to serve mankind. All that I am thus doing
is to follow the more deliberate processes of nature,
for the dropping leaf, the rotting twigs and trunks,
the incidental animal excrement, all happen natu-
rally, even though slowly, if man keeps his hands
off the face of the land.

Here in this growing garden the so-called “green
manuring”’ has helped me mightily to hasten the
process of getting the ground into mellow tilth.
I will write later about choosing weeds; but I may
here properly say a word about how the growing
and turning under of the land-improving plants
has helped. One bit of yellow-red shale grading,
as unpromising for growth as the side of a rock,
has in three years been made into quite respectable
soil by alternating crops of sand vetch and rye
with coatings of manure and plantings of vegetables.

These manure-crops are very nice to see, too!
The rye, sowed last fall just ahead of a freeze-up,
has given us a bright green lawn to look at when-

34 MY GROWING GARDEN

ever the snow is off. The vetch that now covers
another patch with a thick mat of its prostrate
stems Is also persistently green, and will bloom in
purple glory if I do not get it turned under very
early this spring. It is better than the rye, the soil-
sharps tell us, because it gathers from the air the
expensive and essential nitrogen, storing it in
little nodules along the roots. As the whole plant
is to be turned under, I get this nitrogen to work,
and also the humus resulting from the buried
herbage. I will thus have a thin underlying muck-
pile to be rotting into usefulness for a year or more
—for the authorities insist that the full benefit
from a turned-under green-manure crop is not
obtained until the second year.

I must ask pardon for writing of “crops” and
otherwise as if I were dealing with acres instead of
little garden patches! Yet the problems are just
the same, save that my desire, at least, is for more
intensive culture than is usual in acreage work in
rich and wasteful America.

There is another thing to do these March days,
and by all means the most disagreeable of garden
operations. It is to begin spraying, with the un-
pleasantly strong “‘dope’’ requisite to permanently
discourage the big-devil scale, named San José,
and the lesser evil named after the oyster-shell.

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 35

Like other unpleasant things, one is disposed
to postpone the doing; but “take it from me,”
that is a mistake! I waited, or delayed, over one
winter, to spray some beautifully shaped currant-
bushes that had given us a notable crop; and when
I did get around to it, the San José scale had sucked
the juices out of most of the stems, so they had
to be cut off and burned. Nowadays I spray on
the first fair and still day after I see any signs of
either scale, and in late February or early March
everything that is scale-susceptible gets thorough
and repeated going over “for luck,” or for surer
protection against scales and other evils.

This latter general spraying protects as well as
punishes, and it is quite as disagreeable to other
predaceous bugs and their eggs as it is to the two
main scale promoters of destruction I have men-
tioned.

The commercial lime-sulphur spray, in winter
or dormant proportions, and preferably with lead
arsenate added to give it killing potency for any-
thing that eats, is a jaundiced-looking liquid,
rather oily in consistence, and most unsuitable to
get on any clothing ever to be worn again. An
old rubber coat, rubber gloves, a disregardable
hat, and much care to keep to windward, are
essential to the comfort of the operator.

36 MY GROWING GARDEN

Most of all, he needs to be sure to cover every
least twig of the trees and shrubs with the thinnest
coating of the spray. At least twice each tree
needs to be hit with the finest possible mist, high
and low, right and left, and from all sides. To see
to it that the nozzle of the spray tool is clean and
clear, and to filter every drop that goes into the
tank through a sieve good enough for the gasolene
that is to run your automobile, will make for good
work in the shortest time with the least waste.

As to what spray machine to use, I don’t know!
I have some seventy-five-cent hand syringes, an
acceptable shoulder-tank affair, and a barrel-pump
machine mounted on wheels. Any one of them
works when it works, and is abominable when it
doesn’t. The thing to be accomplished, as I have
said, is to get every twig thinly but completely
covered with the spray fluid. Drops hanging down
are no indication of anything but much fluid; the
upper surface of the limb from which the drop
hangs may be entirely free from needed spray-
coating. It is desirable to get the highest pressure
of air possible against the liquid to be sprayed,
so that a wide-spreading fine mist issues from the
nozzle. Pervasiveness, and not quantity, is what
counts and kills.

Persistence, care, observation—all these I have

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 37

tried to use, but I can be humiliated any day by
some spray-sharp who leads me out to the garden,
as one did the other day, to show me a thick coating
of oyster-shell scale along the limbs of two fine
cornuses—the red-twigged and the yellow-twigged
varieties.

But [ll keep spraying; I'll spray without ceas-
ing! I can’t afford to have any part of my growing
garden made a dying garden by these nasty little
pests. Later I'll have to spray the fruit trees in
bloom for protection against the codlin moth and
other predatory bugs, and later again the young
fruits on the grapes and apricots and plums for
eurculio and brown rot and various similar devil-
ments.

On certain March days that have sunned the
soil so it can be moved, I want to make sure that
my apple, peach, plum and apricot trees, and my
cherished red-buds, are free from the hateful
borers that like to chew into the young tree trunks
right at and under the ground. They have termi-
nated the existence of several of the trained dwarf
apple trees I was coddling for early fruiting, and
every such tree on the place has had a visitation.
The only remedy is to dig them out with a knife-
blade and a wire-puncher, and keep after them so
often that they simply can’t get along in peace.

38 MY GROWING GARDEN

I have smeared on concentrated lime-sulphur solu-
tion, which they seem to revel in! Smashing them
with a knife or wire is the only sure thing.

Part of the garden plan for Breeze Hill is that
looking from any part of the house there shall be
an agreeable view of things growing, and that
looking toward the house from any part of the
garden there shall also be a pleasant prospect of
plants or shrubs or trees. That is, I am to imitate
the wisdom of the Frenchmen who have made
Paris beautiful, and to consider vistas in every
direction. Anyone who has visited the French
capital will of course have noted that not even a
letter-box or a lamp-post is planted anywhere
without consideration of its relation to the street
as a whole, which is why the French get so much
beauty for little cost.

Now I ought to be able and willing to do as
well with plants that grow in grace as the shrewd
Gaul does with stiffly permanent architectural
objects. Therefore a series of pictures is to be
created, and I need to have those pictures relate
in color and season to their surroundings. There
can be few or no straight “rows” of anything, and
anyhow I have plenty of straight lines in the bases
of axial walks and ancient hedges which I must
work from and toward.

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 39

These early March days, consequently, I have
been thinking out planting vistas, so that to the
nurserymen may go the lists of needed shrubs and
trees.

I have found that it is easy enough to have the
spring and early summer burst of bloom, but not
so easy to see to it that some flowers are in sight
throughout the summer and the fall.

The colors on the planting-palette are in several
height-forms also. There are yellows in taller
shrubs and in dwarfer spring-blooming bulbs;
there are shadings of pink in herbaceous plants, in
shrubs of varied form; and there is always white
for merging and combining, in bulb and plant and
shrub. Blue comes less easily, and must be placed
where it will fit; some dashes of scarlet are the
exclamation points. _

Then, too, there is form to consider. The
graceful deutzia is to be a fountain of white, while
the hollyhocks in the same vista are like blunted
spires, pointing upward in lemon or crimson or
pink. It is this need for consideration of the effect
that is most trouble and that brings the most
results. I began without the picture idea, and I
hid one shrub behind another, mixed colors regard-
lessly, planted according to the size of the nursery
plant or the root rather than the eventual spread,

40 MY GROWING GARDEN

and did the other things that wasted time and
effort—but gave me humility!

Now I am working more intelligently, and
making fewer mistakes. The mistakes were for my
good; for they made me think out the problems
for myself, as I could not have done had I been
holding to a plan made wholly by someone else.
True, I have had and have held to Mr. Manning’s
admirable general plan; but he has only sketched
the essential outlines, leaving me to fill in the form
and color and personality. Just so I could wish
any other maker of a growing garden might do.

I have in an earlier chapter confessed the lure
of the catalogue as it applies to seeds. That brown
pin-point of a seed is so little, so apparently
trifling, that it seems each time a greater marvel
that any thing should come from it. Yet come it
does; and the sheer sport of expecting and of
waiting makes the seed-adventure the more pleas-
antly alluring.

The shrubby plant and the tree are, somehow,
quite different in catalogue appeal. One seems to
know more completely what is to happen with
them. Then, too, there is quite a price-difference
between ten cents a packet of hundreds of seeds, and
fifty cents or more for one little plant. Thus it is
easier to keep close to shore on the plant orders.

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 41

There is a bothersome deficiency about these
plant catalogues, I find. They say so much and
so little; so much about how fine a thing this
Spirea Van Houtter is, and so little about how
much space it will probably cover in the first five
years and in another similar period. I have had
to dig out some abelias innocently planted only
three feet from a buddleia which in one year
completely overshadowed them. Why didn’t
the catalogue tell me that the funkias would
cover quickly a circle of three feet diameter, while
the dictamnus set near it was easily able to stand
on a square foot of ground? No one guarded me
against the error of crowding peonies too closely
together, or told me that the lovely old bleeding-
heart would take much room until August, and
then simply “get off the earth.”

No catalogue I have seen discusses fully these
‘important points; and when one is actually issued
that shows forth such knowledge, I predict great
demand for it, and I hope for the stock it offers.

In deciding on the shrubs for the vistas, I have
tried to look for autumn and winter color, of fading
leaf and enduring twig, as well as for seasoned
bloom. Few shrubs bloom more than a month, and
the most hardly half so long; but the leaves are
often a full month in changing color before they

42 MY GROWING GARDEN

drop, and the twigs and branches are in bare
view for most of six months. It is therefore most
desirable to know how the subject in mind will
work into the fall and winter picture, as well as
what its budding, leafing and blooming earlier
will be like.

I have been enjoying, these leafless days, the
warm yellow-gray tone of a young lilac that held
its foliage in solid green right through the early
frosts until December’s sudden zero dropped them,
and I recognize a new merit in this pleasant twig
color. Some time the catalogues that offer me
nature-paints in plants with which to work out
year-round pictures will get to telling all about
their pigments, so that I may use them with
more assurance in an endeavor to get varieties
that have more than temporary attractiveness.
The reading of the bulletins of the wonderful
Arnold Arboretum, at Jamaica Plain, Massachu-
setts, has shown me how that world-master of
trees and shrubs, Professor Sargent, is continually
telling us unacute Americans of the real values of
ornamental plants at all seasons. Who would buy
furniture for his home that would be pleasant to
see only two or three months in the year? And
why should we furnish our gardens so wholly with
the plants that explode into one bloom burst, with

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 43

little to commend them for all the rest of the year,
when we might as well have the bloom plus good
autumn color and attractive winter twigs?

When it comes to buying these needed shrubs
that must get into the ground as soon as it is
workable, I am after quality rather than lowest
price. There is frequently a difference of fifty per
cent in price between the offerings made by several
nurserymen for the same item. The lowest-priced
is not often the cheapest. One bushy, well-rooted
spirea, for instance, full of vigor and showing trans-
planting and good soil help, and dug so that it
comes to me with all its roots, is worth four or
five spindly, leggy plants just as high, but plainly
disclosing their poor origin and maintenance, and
not infrequently delivered to the planter with both
scanty and mutilated roots. |

I made the mistake of buying in one order the
larger-sized shrubs, rather than those a year
younger and of medium but stocky size. They
were bigger when they came, to be sure, but they
indicated plainly their need of severe pruning,
which when given set them back more than a
year. Now I ask for young and vigorous plants,
which are more likely to come with roots but little
mutilated, and I see the better results in growth,
besides saving the considerable difference in cost.

4A MY GROWING GARDEN

To be sure, there are a few nurserymen who keep
transplanting and root-pruning all the time, and
who can in consequence ship large shrubs, with a
“ball” of earth burlaped about the roots. But
these fine things are hardly “my size,” for I must
make each garden dollar count to the utmost.
March is passing while these experiences are
being told. About the opening day of the almanac
or official spring, on the twenty-first, it is allowable
to look for evidences of the sun’s power. Under the
old arborvitz hedge, and along its southern border,
I am accustomed to find some white sweet violets
that are there happily naturalized. Their fra-
grance is as delightful as it is significant of things
doing in the bosom of Mother Earth. The crocuses
are likely to pop open suddenly some one of these
mornings, nor will a snow flurry or a sharp frost
discompose them in the least. Of course the snow-
drops are up and doing; they seem to prefer to
invite comparison between their whiteness and
that of the frozen water that gives them name. In
sunny facings, the Golden Spur narcissus buds
show richly yellow, and they promise an early
April glow. The pussy-willow buds are well along,
as the first of the bees soon discover, and those fat
lilac buds are almost bursting. There are signs
and scents and sights of spring all about the

PuaTtEe VII. “March is passing . . . The crocuses are likely to
pop open suddenly.”’ (See page 44.)

GETTING INTO THE GROUND 45

garden, even though in northern corners some time-
worn snow yet lingers. Where I lift the loose pro-
tection from the bulb beds, I see there fat yellowish
green shoots, hunting the light; but I drop back
the litter, and say, “Not yet; Jack Frost is looking
for you!”

The soil, too, in this last week of the month is
usually fit to push a spade into. To plant roses,
trees, shrubs, now, means a greater assurance of
prosperity for them. This is true especially of
“dormant” or outdoor-grown roses, much the best
kind to plant. All the better if the ground was
made ready before frost closed it in the early winter;
but whenever it is workable in March, the holes
may be made, and the soil stirred up with rotten
manure, to be fully prepared for planting promptly
when the shrubs are at hand.

It has been a sort of fetish with us to plant
early peas in March, if possible, just as my Pennsyl-
vania German ancestors believed that St. Patrick’s
day—March seventeenth—was the one time for
sowing late cabbage seed, even if it had to be sowed
on the snow! Neither habit seems sensible; for we
assuredly take better care of our cabbage-sowings
now in a coldframe, and I have found that Gradus
peas sown the last days of March, in soil that had
not felt the warming touch of the sun to any depth,

46 MY GROWING GARDEN

hardly keep pace with those put into more cheerful
ground some days later. It is the same with sweet
peas; they love cool ground, I know, but they dis-
criminate against chilly ground, often soaked with
snow water.

No vital harm has happened, in my garden, if
March has passed without a single seed being sown
in the open. My acute friend Kirby, a real seeds-
man, is threatening to put forth a table of soil
temperatures, so that we may know just what is
the right Fahrenheit degree at six inches depth to
spell quick germination for the peas and spinach
and other desirable “garden sass’ items. I think
such knowledge would be most valuable to have
and desirable to work with.

I remembered how as a boy I saw rhubarb
hurried up in early spring by covering the plants
with barrels. Two years ago I did it here, and with
the same success; but by accident the third March
one barrel was used that was completely tight—it
was a sugar barrel, I think. And there had been
heaped about it some rather hot horse-manure, this
as usual. The result was that under the tight barrel,
admitting no least ray of light, there sprang up
the most beautiful, tender and altogether delicious
leaf-stalks of rhubarb. The leaves under the barrels
that admitted some light and air were good, but

GETTING INTO THE GROUND AT

not of the superlative excellence of those growing
in the warm darkness. Therefore I shall every
March hereafter see to it that similar conditions
are provided for some of my rhubarb plants.

During the latter half of March the hotbeds and
coldframes have been made useful to start things
for the early outdoor garden, and to push ahead
the long-season flower items particularly. Asters,
cosmos, salvia, petunia and many other seeds are
in or germinating or up. To have a long season
with tomatoes, plants sown in late February are
now transplanted to pots, and they will be kept
going right along. There are really earlier sorts
for these advance plantings—Field’s Early June
is one that made good almost in June with us.

It was rather hard to get my business mind to
take up garden problems in the earlier years of this
growing garden, but now the family jogs me if I
slip, and my son is ready to do the actual early
work with that particularity which means success.
We are determined to eat from Breeze Hill garden
as early and as late as prevision can arrange, and
so there is thought to plan the succession for a
long season of better things than any money can
bring. For eye pleasing, we want flowers early—
they are with us already, as I have noted, while
snow yet remains—and we want them in sight

48 MY GROWING GARDEN

every day until long after the first frost stops the
tender things. Such is the garden programme,
modified by the absence of a trained gardener and
his appurtenant greenhouses. We are the garden-
ers, and our frames, cold and “‘hot,’’ must do the
early pushing. We face the planting months with
much anticipation and each year with growing
confidence.

CHAPTER IV—APRIL
PLANTING OF ALL SORTS, AND SOME RESULTS

LANT; plant early, plant carefully; but
plant! Such is the impulse of April; and
the planting must be of seeds for food and

for flower, of trees for fruit and for foliage, and of
shrubs and plants for all these ends. Plant early;
that is the vital point for most things, as my five
interesting years of Breeze Hill garden experience
sums it up.

For it seems in some way to definitely promote
the prosperity and progress of the plants if this
chilly April ground settles early about their roots,
even if a later snow or two suggests a return to
winter. The reason probably is that, with the
plant or tree thus in place, the root action may
begin without any waste of time at just the moment
enough of the sun’s warmth is available; while
later planting, in too many cases, means that
healthy root action has been begun in the wrong
place—at the nursery, in the package, or where
temporarily “heeled in” awaiting weather, ground
preparation, or convenience.

D (49)

50 MY GROWING GARDEN

One season I bought dormant roses from a
nursery north of me, which came and were planted
before April fifteenth. They were so sturdy and
stocky and good-looking that I ordered “more of
the same;” but the second shipment, caught in that
big nursery’s spring rush, was delayed until early
May, so that the second lot of roses were not
planted until May fifteenth. Most of the plants
were yet “dormant,” or unstarted; but though the
planting was careful, the ground warm, the rains
encouraging, more than a third of them either
failed to grow at all, or died after making a weak
start. All of the earlier lot grew without check,
and bloomed beautifully the first season.

I have had other similar experiences, and I have
suggested to some of my rose-growing friends that
it would be showing good business courage if
there were plain refusal, on the part of the nursery-
man, to ship roses after a certain critical date
for each climate range. Failures would be fewer,
and consequently planting would be more liberally
undertaken; for nothing so discourages the average
garden-maker as having plants die for him when
he has done his best.

For me, dormant roses must be planted in
March if they are available and if the ground can
be worked, but certainly before April twentieth.

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 51

And I don’t at all care for the “started’’ roses in
pots; they may doubtless do beautifully in many
places, but have so far done most unbeautifully
in my garden. Can I be blamed for following the
indications of my own experience?

Other trees and shrubs are less sensitive to the
calendar, I think; but any hardy, dormant, growing
thing is given a better chance for prosperity if it is
planted early. The nurserymen are willing and
glad to get the “stock” off to the planter as soon
as the ground is open to them. Some of them
carry certain trees and plants over winter in great
sheds, where they are unfrozen; and if the stock in
these sheds is “heeled in” so that the roots are
covered with damp soil, the plants may be con-
sidered good. Where the storage is in bins, with
exposed roots, I have come to believe that the
vitality of the trees and plants is materially
lessened over winter; wherefore I should prefer
for myself freshly dug stock, even if it had to come
a little later. —

If I do not here set down my belief that one can
with success plant anything at any time, if he
takes trouble enough, I shall be blamed with incon-
sistency later. Such is my belief, based on some
experience; but I call particular attention to the
italics. The “trouble enough” is trouble enough,

52 MY GROWING GARDEN

or there will be trouble if it is no¢ enough; where-
fore the path of ease and certainty lies along the
planting ways of proper times.

Several of the seven old horse-chestnuts that
too closely embowered the mansion-house at
Breeze Hill were considerably decayed, I found that
first spring. Two of them were cut out entirely,
admitting sunlight to the home, and giving room
for the remaining five to fill out more comfortably.
To these five the attention of my old friend John
Davey was asked; and he found them badly split,
and that their trunks were partly rotten. Later his
men came and practised “‘tree surgery”’ upon these
same trunks, and with the most favorable results.
In one trunk, split at its forking a dozen feet from
the ground, a nut from the tree had germinated,
and had so grown in the rotting wood of its own
parent tree as to have more than two feet in length
of bushy roots! This tree was the “sickest” of
all; but cleaning out the infection, putting in strong
iron bones in place of its decayed wooden heart,
filling with cement, bracing with chains, started it
to growing most vigorously and happily. It has
not failed any spring to be covered with its lovely
blooms, and the young growth is “rolling” over
the opening in the trunk as if it intended to make
a complete covering.

Puatse VIII. ‘Tree surgery . . . This tree was the ‘sickest’ . . .

ly and happily.” (See page 52.)

igorous

i WY

now growing mos

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 53

At first blush, the average cost of about $30
for each tree, which was the surgical expense,
seemed large. When I considered that it would
take all of thirty favoring years of new growing to
give me as good a tree as the tree doctor provided
from the old wreck in two weeks of intelligent
repair work, I had to conclude that the job was
cheap enough. Looking fairly at one hundred and
fifty dollars “saved”’ and the five trees gone—and
they were going fast!—the money made a mighty
small pile, and it cast no shade from the summer’s
sun, as the trees did, and continue to do. It is
“me for the tree-dactor” now, because I have no
certainty that I can wait on earth for young trees
to replace the old and picturesque ones that make
this growing garden fit to live in.

Just the same way I have felt about the giant
sycamore which dominates the whole place. An
ill-intentioned “‘anthracnose,”’ as Professor Whetzel
calls it, had been pushing off the young leaves in
the spring soon after they spread their soft greenery
to the sun, and thus forcing the tree to make a
second crop of leaves each season, much to its
quite apparent distress. Without assuring me of
its efficacy, the professor advised spraying with
bordeaux mixture to discourage the anthracnose.
Now spraying my orchard of dwarf trees not over

54 MY GROWING GARDEN

six feet high is one thing, but quite another is
spraying the primeval monarch, up toward a
hundred feet in the air, ten feet about at breast
height, and with a spread over the lawn of seventy-
five feet! It could be done, however, and it has
been done, three times, to the tree’s apparent
benefit. Any reasonable thing is worth while to
keep alive and happy a big or a fine or an eye-
filling tree, as I see it.

The dwarf fruit-garden, or orchard, was planted
at Breeze Hill during this month of rains. I
thought I had not space enough for “standard”
trees, and I have shared the common belief that
many years would pass before they would bear.
The dwarfs, planted closer and fruiting sooner,
seemed indicated, and they were put in place the
next April after our June first occupancy of this
garden-home. They have prospered mightily and
fruited scantily, save as to the plums and peaches
and the trashy Bismarck apple. If it were all to
do over again, I think I would plant standard trees,
rather than dwarfs; but the first full fruiting year
may change this feeling. Certainly the dwarf
orchard is good to look upon.

The apple and pear trees were trained speci-
mens from Germany. In addition, I planted some
thirty-six feet of an “‘espalier’’ just south of the

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 55

old arborvitze hedge, because it seemed an ideal
place for training some pears and apples upon the
framework known by the French name given
above. The twelve trees for this affair had been
“personally conducted”’ for the purpose from their
tender youth, I presume, and a really delightful
German gardener attached to a nearby nursery
has trained me to train them up as they should
go—which is great fun.

I have had no illusions about this espalier
planting. J knew it was not necessary in this
fruit-favorable climate to tie up each stem and
twig to face the sun; but I have wanted to see
what would come of it. I’m seeing, and I’m not
dissatisfied. The first fruits came last year on
two trees, and they were good; but they were even
prettier than they were good. And, too, it gives
me such a fine chance to swell up a little when I
lead visitors to this nook, to disclose to their
surprised gaze these elaborately flattened out little
trees!

The small-fruit part of this garden has been
quite satisfactory. The currants have done ex-
ceedingly well, except as interrupted by San José
scale when I was not vigilant. The blackberries
and red raspberries, both trained on wires, have
likewise done their full duty by us.

56 MY GROWING GARDEN

The neighborhood of this old garden was famous
for its strawberries, as I shall detail later, and I
have maintained that fame in my later plantings,
I think. The last April planting was of one hun-
dred ‘‘Progressive,” a fall-bearing sort, which—
but there! I’m getting ahead of my story.

The resolve to make this garden give us good
things to eat implies attention to vegetable seed-
sowing early and often in April. The very first
day of the month saw a sowing of “Gradus”’ peas,
and on the fourteenth, last year, we tried an exper-
iment proposed in a garden journal by a seed-sharp
whose ambition somewhat outruns his knowledge.
Eight separate sorts of peas were sowed the same
day, the promise being that they would mature in
such succession as to give us six weeks of a vege-
table that we are fond of. They didn’t happen
exactly that way, but somewhat so, as will later
appear.

Radishes, of course, come along in April—the
nice little French breakfast sorts in about three
weeks after sowing, if the ground is rich and fine.
I didn’t know last year how good spinach was,
until autumn; but this year it is going to come
along with the peas, in two weeks’ successions,
with the New Zealand variety as the summer
standby.

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 57

Sweet peas are to be sown early, and we try to
get them in about with the first “eat’’ peas, though
I am not at all sure that it is an advantage to do
so. They deserve a little warmth in the soil, as
well as soil of extra depth—we work it and enrich
it full two feet, for results. No longer am I inclined
to have so many sorts—a half-dozen is probably
too many, though the descriptions of new sorts
each season are most seductive!

When I read the English literature about sweet
peas, I am almost afraid to sow any here. Who are
we recent Pennsylvanians, merely three or four
generations from the woods, to compete with soil
three feet deep, edged by lawns a thousand years
old! This climate, too, passing rapidly from frost
to near-boiling, is unkind to plants that love moist,
cool soil, and sunny cool days. Yet such as they
come to be, sweet peas in America are “not so
worse,’ and I’ll keep along, always working toward
better care, plenty of husky fertilizer, and water,
water, water! The plants will not stay green to
the very ground, and we will fail to pick every
bloom before it spends itself in a seed-pod; but
we'll have at least some of the pleasure our British
friends gloat over. It seems practicable to go
down into the earth the best part of a yard with
the sweet pea trench, and to start with six inches

58 MY GROWING GARDEN

of rough manure to hold moisture, following with
layers of soil and manure to the top.

I wonder what is the best training procedure for
peas of all sorts? In this garden we’ve fussed with
many sorts of equivalents for the “‘brush” that
would probably be ideal until we had it. For peas
to eat, we’ve used “chicken wire,” even up to
four and five feet; but it’s a sort of expensive nui-
sance. For sweet peas, the chicken wire, and also
a scheme of strips my ingenious son worked out,
which seemed to meet all needs when planned, and
nearly none when used. Six-foot cypress stakes,
driven in a foot, and “strung”? between with
coarse twine, worked once; but it was slow business
to put the trellis up, and heavy rains set it to -
twisting around too much. There are costly
trellises in the catalogues, or in the seed-stores;
but I can’t take so much of my slim garden appro-
priation for things that won’t grow.

One year I had planted some sweet peas in late
fall, to secure an earlier start. I presume the start
was so early it got clear away, for only four plants
did actually come through. They grew vocifer-
ously, and with, in consequence of much mortality
amongst their neighbors, plenty of room. So I
provided them—the fearless four—with a little
effect of sticks and strings on which they produced

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 59

many and large flowers. This gave me the knowl-
edge that much room—a half-foot or more—would
probably mean more prosperity for the sweet
peas, wherefore the opening year is to see a similar
provision for fewer sorts and many less plants
than usual. But the trellis?

One sort of trellis I do know about: the trellis
for the espalier, for grape-vines, for blackberry
and raspberry canes. What I know is that the
ordinary “galvanized wire’ offered as weather-
proof, and which I dutifully strung on the heavy
pipe posts of the espalier and on the durable locust
posts set for the grape-vines and the “bush” fruits
or brambles, has simply evaporated into nasty
brown rust within five years. It was not honest
iron wire, really “galvanized” with zinc, but
bessemer steel wire, merely breathed upon with
the white vapor of hot spelter. Bessemer steel is
a great structural material, I understand, with
tensile strength and other qualities plus; but
exposed to the air it invites oxygen to put it back
into the earth that gave it, and that speedily!

I complained volubly to the hardware man who
sold me this bunch of rust, and he admitted the
worthlessness of the wire, adding that there was
no really reliable wire obtainable. Then he pro-
posed aluminum, which I bought and applied,

60 MY GROWING GARDEN

obtaining for the grape-vines a fine trellis, evi-
dently durable enough, but too evidently more
than reasonably expensive, for the wire cost one
cent per foot.

There was on the place a tangled mass of the
wire that had been removed from the grape trel-
lises of a generation gone, and this was entirely
intact, so far as rust was concerned. From that
bundle I used many pieces for varied purposes.
Later, seeing certain advertising of pure iron, I
pursued a correspondence which has put into my
tool-house now, for use this year, a coil of “Armco”
iron wire, claimed to be really serviceable.

In addition to being a good time for planting,
April is a proper month for much garden work in
the way of clearing the grounds. The lawn needs
raking, seed and fertilizer sowing and rolling; and
earliness counts in lawn-repairing and in lawn-
making just as it does in rose-planting. The
grasses seem to be full of willingness to work in
cool ground, and I have seen some curious happen-
ings out of the same seed-bag sown from three
weeks apart, as between an almost solid stand of
dandy little grass plants in the one early case, and
a nearly as solid stand of pesky weeds in the sad
later case. I know it is very much worth while to
mend lawns and to make lawns just as early as

border glows now in Emperor.” (See page 66.)

Puate IX. “April is a daffodil month . . . The driveway crescent

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 61

possible. Indeed, there have been good results
here in this garden with seeding so late in the fall
that the germination did not take place until
spring, when it happened happily and completely,
to the destruction of weed seeds and weed prospects.
‘ My preference for native trees and shrubs has
been expressed. It seems to me very much worth
while, in addition, to see and study shrubs from
other climes which may become valuable here.
There is a pleasurable feeling, a fascination, in
experimenting with possibilities, so long as the
main features of the planting are safely American.
To work with “novelties”’ in plants is little less a
lottery than to sow the seeds that are to produce
something better than the best, even if the best
does not always happen. The Arnold Arboretum
—the most permanently organized educational
museum in all the world, about which I wish I
might write a book!—is looking out to bring to
America, to try, and to provide growers with, the
trees and shrubs found in lands afar off. For it
my friend Wilson, a prince of plantsmen, has
spent years in going over the western part of
China, that region having been selected because
of its greater climatic variations, the rigor of its
winters, and because of a singular geologic simi-
larity which seems to give the places six weeks

62 MY GROWING GARDEN

travel west from Pekin a curious relation to
eastern North America. In sending Mr. Wilson
to the very borders of Thibet, Professor Sargent
was acting upon his own estimation of the un-
touched plant possibilities of that region. .
The result has more than justified the expec-
tations. Thousands of new but similar trees and
plants have been obtained, often at great risk,
and amid thrilling conditions. These plants are
growing at the Arboretum, and from them Mr.
Wilson has selected about a hundred for me to
try out here at Breeze Hill. It was on an April
day several years ago that I unpacked the box
of mysteries and planted the Arboretum shrub-
bed. To watch these plants start and grow, to
note their differences and their habits, is to me
of the greatest interest. Knowing nothing at all
of their habits, I have had to plant at haphazard,
and that has added to the interest. Beside a
standard lonicera—a bush honeysuckle—was set
another lonicera. How did I know that the first
named was an “up-and-coming” sort that would
make a great mass in two growing seasons, while
its seeming brother of the same family was a
hug-the-ground trailer that was quickly covered
out of sight, because too near? Here was a syringa,
and that I knew to be of lilac relationship; but

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 63

its dainty cut foliage, “pinnatifid’’ in scientific
accuracy, seemed to belie the name until an even
daintier flower came to herald what may happen
this year. There have been many surprises, so
far, and others are coming, I know. The subjects
that have bloomed are different, beautiful, and
worth while; and that is just what Professor
Sargent has been aiming for, as the tree and
plant benefactor he is.

The Arboretum bed has been rather consider-
ably changed, last fall and this spring, to give
room to the more vigorous plants, and to put
certain shrubs where they will obviously be better
placed. That is part of the fun of it.

Three years after the dwarf orchard was
planted there were several vacancies to fill, caused
by the assiduous work of the borers. I concluded
to fill them, and to add as well several varieties
of “old-home” pears, planting standard rather
than dwarf trees. One Bismarck apple that had
passed on gave room for another old-home sort,
the Smokehouse. I’m working out a theory in
the planting of this apple tree. From a nursery
that grows apple trees by the million I had sent
me a selected one-year-old Smokehouse—that is,
one year from the bud, one season’s growth of the
Smokehouse scion, but two years of root age. This

64 MY GROWING GARDEN

I trimmed to a “whip,” meaning a straight stem
without branches, and its fine roots I also shortened
just a little.

A hole two feet deep was dug, and at its bottom
a crowbar was driven down another two feet.
Into this four-foot depth was slipped a stick of
forty per cent dynamite. After the thorough
“tamping-in” that followed, the dynamite was
exploded, shaking up the subsoil quite thoroughly
without bringing much of it to the surface. In the
re-shaped hole, with much good soil, bone dust
and manure packed well away from its present
roots, the Smokehouse was planted. It grew
vigorously last season, and will, I hope, accomplish
its destined work of beginning to bear in about
five years, aided by heavy summer pruning. Four
fine pear trees were similarly planted, and have
responded pleasingly.

Toward the end of April the sun usually has
started things into the joy of spring in this garden.
The grass, of course, is delightfully green quite
early in the month, and the flowers that consider
early snows only an impertinence of waning winter
are blooming before the fifteenth. Crocuses carry-
ing over from March have made the south-facing
border gay; the deepened sky-blue of the scilla
has excited us along the walk from the house; and

Puate X. “The forsythia . . . its yellow bells are Shaka gas eemee
At the foot there blooms a crescent of Golden Spur
narcissus.”” (See page 65.)

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 65

“Lovers’ Lane”’ is richly showing forth its woods
gems. Hepatica, bloodroot, rue anemone and
tooth-wort precede the trilliums which are in full
show by the last week of the month. In the
formal garden, the English sweet violet, one of
my “weeds,” about which I will write later, is
opening its flowers, some of which were showing
in late March.

The apricot and the Japanese plums are a
wonderful show in mid-April, with their complete
cloud of white blossoms. By the time they are
falling—and making me hustle to spray them—
the Norway maples are showing their orchid-like
flowers, seen of few, I fear; for their yellow-
green clusters overhead, both lovely and sweet,
are accepted by the thoughtless as the breaking
leaves. There is a threat of opening in the opulent
apple buds, which are pink-streaked now, but
will need May days to spread them.

Of the shrubs the forsythia is the only one here
to bloom fully in April. Its yellow bells are
shaking in the rainy breezes for ten days or so,
though the blooms at Breeze Hill have been
scantier since a fierce winter that evidently
chilled them below the power to live. At the foot
of one fine plant which is the April color point of
the most important living picture from the south

66 MY GROWING GARDEN

side of the house there now blooms a crescent of
Golden Spur narcissus, the hues of which fit ideally
with the forsythia’s clear lemon bells.

The lilacs show the sun’s power in bursting
buds and each morning I look to see how near are
the first sweet blooms. With the Arboretum lilac
surprises to come, I suspect the bloom season will
be a long one.

A rather overlooked shrub, Spirea arguta (it has
no “common”’ name, I believe), sometimes wakes
up at the end of April. It is sure to bloom showily
very early in May, and why more folks haven’t
found out what a lovely white bloom-fountain it
is, I do not know. It can properly be considered
as opening the spring season of shrubby spireas,
to be followed by the well-known Van Houttei,
and then—at fortunate Breeze Hill—by one of
Wilson’s fine Chinese discoveries, Spirea Henryt,
with its abundant creamy white blooms. |

April is a daffodil month in this garden. Begin-
ning with Golden Spur, there follow Emperor and
Empress, the charming jonquil and the double
Von Sion. Other and finer sorts are to bloom
this year, and I am hopeful of getting fully settled
in my own knowledge the definite classes of this
charming family, of which most garden-lovers
know all too little. The sorts that give a range of

PLANTING OF ALL SORTS 67

form and color and season are not at all necessarily
expensive, as I found when I saw them in Mr.
Hunt’s great trial-garden last season. I have
planted to naturalize the bulbs in several favor-
able places where they can fight the grass at their
pleasure, and appear incidentally in it in later
years. It is evident that the narcissi are to be
pleasing features of this growing garden, unless all
signs fail. The driveway crescent border glows
now in Emperor, with here and there the dainty
Rugulosus. This crescent must always glow, if I
can so manage.

If there is anything more worth getting wet in
than a warm April rain, I do not know about it.
It is quite comfortable, thank you, to the normal
outdoor human, and it is seemingly exciting to
most plant growth. I have been standing under
the big Norway maple at the west end of the
formal garden, seeing things happen, and inhaling
the intensified sweetness that this sort of shower
brings out. The maple blooms overhead literally
drip fragrance, and wherever in the borders the
dainty arabis is planted, there is a spot of white,
faintly odorous. The yellow perennial alyssum
is like a spot of sunshine in the rain, while the
bells of the convallaria—a name so much easier
to say than lily-of-the-valley !—have each a crystal

68 MY GROWING GARDEN

hanging from them. My pet weed, the columbine
-—and I will explain this later—is just making its
bow, and the rain causes interesting action in such
of its flowers as are opening.

Planting there has been, all April; but there
are also some results, and the garden is very much
alive as May days impend. The table has had its
first asparagus, and the forced rhubarb-stalks,
forced as I have previously noted, in total darkness,
are delicious. There is for the eye and for the
nostrils a feast now spread, and the palate has its
pleasures as well. All is right with the season and
the growing garden.

Puate XI. “In a warm April rain . . . under the Norway maple at the west end.’ (See page 67.

Puate XII. “The loveliness of the horse-chestnut’s foot-long
panicle.” (See page 72.)

CHAPTER V—MAY
SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS

F I could readjust the calendar, May would
have at least fifty days, without abstracting
any of them from the April that makes May

possible or from the June into which it matures.
Many outdoor folks would agree with me that
we could spare enough days out of February and
early March to stretch May several weeks.

It is not the work to do and the beauty of the
garden to see that is the main motive for this
greedy desire. Before I had a growing garden of
my own, I spent much of May in God’s greater
garden, seeing the happenings of that annual
resurrection that ought to put faith into anyone.
Now that there is much to keep me at Breeze
Hill, I am not so free for the woods; yet they call
me more than ever.

I want to see the great fiddle-heads of the
cinnamon ferns do again what I have often seen
them do. I long for the hillside dotted with red-
bud and dogwood. The wild phlox, the mertensia,
the “Dutchman’s breeches,” the May apple,—how

(69)

70 MY GROWING GARDEN

can I stay away from their annual reception, to
which I have long had a standing invitation? Who
is to give to the sermons of Jack-in-the-pulpit the
cheerful attention he expects of me? That spring
mist of indescribable color that clothes the oak
trees; those fascinating flowers on the shagbark
hickory; the opening of the box-elder’s blooms—
all these call me. The myriad sights of the May
awakening mean much to me, and I would have
advantage in a dual existence, or in an extended
month, so that I might have the wild beauty of
the hillside and the woods no less because I am
working into shape my growing garden.

Yet I can have some of both. In “Lovers’
Lane,” hedged with great arborvites, shaded from
the ardent sun, no exotics, no garden shrubs, may
grow. Here I have been locating the plants I love,
and which I take, reverently, carefully, decently,
from the wild. When the call of the woods is no
longer to be denied, old “Tom” is hitched up;
boxes, papers and trowels are provided, and with
my life-partner, who is nearly as fond of these
nature-jewels as I am, I drive to certain favored
haunts. Awhile we look, and listen, and inhale,
and visit, joyously greeting our old friends all
made fresh and new in God’s spring providence;
and then some plants are selected, lifted with the

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 71

greatest care to take all their roots, quickly
wrapped or packed away to avoid distresses to
them; and we turn homeward in time to have
these visitors bedded before sundown into a better
place than that from which they came, if possible.
It has long been my pride that no one shall see
where I have thus lifted plants; for I thin out
only, and do not exterminate.

Although most of these my wild plant friends
stay with me, and joyfully increase in Lovers’
Lane, I confess to a feeling of desecration as I
thus take from nature’s garden. Yet I know that
I leave that garden no worse, and sometimes better;
for I return again, and see that the thinning-out
process has been beneficial.

Last May I heard of a great showing of the
lovely wild Cypripedium acaule, or pink moccasin-
flower, in a valley some miles away. A friend’s
‘ automobile took me to the wonderful sight of
hundreds of these woods aristocrats in full flower.
It was a sad sight, too; for the forest that had
sheltered them had been cut off, and this was their
last brave blooming. The sun would soon bake
their tender roots, and another season only the
strongest would make a faint showing. So I dug
them liberally, carefully, and in sorrow; for I was
not, and am not, at all certain that they will live

72 MY GROWING GARDEN

in the shady corners at Breeze Hill to which in a
few hours they were transplanted. But I have
done my best to save for remembrance some, at
least, of this finest of Pennsylvania orchids. At
Eagles Mere I am sure of it, at all events.

Those five distinctive horse-chestnuts that
guard the Breeze Hill home, of the tree-doctoring
of which I have written, are now in their great
glory of bloom. I wish I knew how to picture in
words the detailed loveliness of the horse-chest-
nut’s foot-long panicle, made up of flowers of
complex form and dainty coloring. With the
liriodendron or tulip, this tree may well be said to
make blooms as fine as any orchid.

In Lovers’ Lane the conditions are not yet
ideal. The hardships to which the great arbor-
vitzes that inclose it were subjected before I came
to own the place, have caused many of them to
die. Four Norway maples had grown up in their
very midst, crowding out the evergreens, and
sucking dry the soil around those that survived.
Two of the maples I have cut down and cut out,
and their numerous progeny of husky seedlings I
have pulled out.

At the worst breaks in the hedges, I have
planted native rhododendrons—after repeated fail-
ures in the endeavor to have replacing arborvites

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 73

live. To give these rhododendrons a reasonable
chance, a trench two and a half feet deep was dug,
close up to the intruding maples. Next the maples
one trench was lined with heavy slates on one
side, and in the other a cement-mortar brick wall
was built, to keep out the hungry maple roots.
Then these great and noble rhododendrons from
the mountains were planted thickly in precious
leaf-mold, better than that they came out of. A
_ foot-deep mulch of leaves was put over the filled
trench, and the hose turned in for hours.

The rhododendrons have said “Thank you,”
and have gone right on blooming and growing,
giving me a bit of the wild glory of the hills in
June, and all the time the lovely greenery of their
leaves. I have watched and watered and mulched
them continually. Whenever in the days above
freezing temperature their leaves droop, it is a
pathetic request for a drink, and I hear, heed
and water.

Along the border are the wild children of the
woods. As I cannot possibly fill it all in one
season—nor do I want to—the wild blue violet
has been permitted to spread. It will grow in any
soil, and soon possess the neighborhood, if one is
not ruthless and careful. But it is a wonderful
sight these May days to see the thousands of its

4 MY GROWING GARDEN

blooms, in all shades of blue and violet, uplifted
to the light.

Of other friends of the great Pennsylvania forest
floor I have many. In April, as I have said, came
hepatica and bloodroot and others of the earliest.
May gives us weeks of the dainty mertensia,
with its sky-blue pink-edged nodding bells, and
its broad leaves that vanish utterly before mid-
summer. Spring beauty, Phlox divaricata, tiarella,
rue anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, uvularia, two of
the cypripediums, several trilliums—all these come
in due time, and to our great pleasure. The wild
columbine is naturalized and happy at the south-
east corner, and a wealth of bloom is seen for
weeks. From these plants are grown the “weed”
columbines I am to tell of later.

In other borders, on the cool north sides of
hedges, are growing ferns from the woods of
Eagles Mere, and the up-standing white baneberry
annually shows us a marvel of stem color. Some
things I can’t make stay—the cardinal flower, the
“showy orchis” that is never showy but always
lovely, the calopogon that I really want;—these are
not yet at home for me. But I have scores of little
laurels and rhododendrons, and some mighty nice
small hemlocks and pines, that are quite “comfy,”
‘and show it. One old veteran of a yew—the pic-

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 15

turesque low-growing American yew, that one of
my mountain friends calls the “fruiting hemlock”’
because of its clear carmine berries—came to me
on a forlorn hope with some rhododendrons, and
it is flourishing in the proper shady spot.

For three years I have been trying to make
comfortable several clumps of the checkerberry,
or Mitchella, so common in Pennsylvania forests,
but nearly as hard to successfully naturalize as
the trailing arbutus. I had it actually growing and
blooming in a certain spot, until an Italian laborer
with more muscle than mind weeded it out one
day. I weeded him out in a hurry, and then
rescued the Mitchella; but neither that nor other
clumps have seemed really satisfied.

A great advantage of this old place in which I
am growing a garden is its variety of exposures
and facings, as well as its interesting vistas. I
have previously mentioned the potential bigness
of this two acres, and I am realizing it more all the
planting and growing time. Does a shrub or plant
need full sunshine to the east, to the south, to the
west? It can be accommodated. Isa cool, northern
shaded corner requisite? It is here. Must the
plant have shelter from the wind? We have it. Is
a half-shaded warm southern exposure desirable?
No trouble at all!

16 MY GROWING GARDEN

So there is great pleasure in selecting the right
place, either at first or when lack of prosperity in
growth has shown the need of a move. Such moves
are made any time the ground is not deeply frozen,
or too wet, and without relation to leafage, bloom-
ing or fruiting; for with the taking of trouble
enough, as I have previously said, anything can
be moved at any time. Now it is not trouble, but
pleasure, when a growing young plant is to be
more favorably located, to first prepare the hole
to receive it; then with two spades to get all
around the plant where it is, deftly loosening and
lifting it without baring a root; and then to
promptly and gently drop it in the more com-
fortable location, where with firming and watering
and shading—if needed—it goes right along with-
out check.

May is the month when fruit flowers shame
the purely ornamental part of the garden. The
apricot and some of the plums have found the
last April days favorable for opening their blos-
soms, but it is in the first May week here that
they give us the best of the first and finest fruit
feast—that of the eyes. The cherries and the
peaches are great globes of bloom, and they are
just about shaking their snowy and pink petals
to the ground when the apples begin to open.

PuatTE XIII. “The apple blooms . . . the spraying game.” (1)
Not open; too soon. (11) Wide open, not fertilized; too soon.
(111) Calyx open and relaxed; just right for spraying.

(1v) Calyx yet open; still right. (See page 77.)

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 77

With these dwarf apple trees at Breeze Hill, the
whole of the picture is in sight, and a lovely picture
it is! A “‘near-apple,” otherwise one of the crab-
apple family, known as Pyrus or Malus floribunda,
is the especial and exquisite beauty of them all.
Wholly covered with buds that swell and swell into
red ovals, there comes a day when these ovals
burst into a pink bloom that is astonishing in its
combination of flamboyance and delicacy.

The apple blooms on the espalier have given
this year a chance to really get wise to the spraying
game. A friendly fruit-sharp has suggested that
we watch and picture the various stages, and it
has been done. See the cluster of blooms only
partly open; no poison for the mean little cater-
pillar that grows into the codlin-moth could pene-
trate. Even the wide-open cluster is not right, for
the fertilization is not complete, and the stamens
crowd closely upon the pistils, closing up the heart
of the flower that is to be the heart of the fruit.
But when the winds have blown the flowers about,
and the bees have had their fill of the sweetness,
incidentally brushing the pollen on to the waiting
stigmas; when the petals, no longer useful in color
and odor to advertise the honey that is to pay the
bee for his help, have just fallen; when the calyx
is open and relaxed, and the heart of the flower-

78 MY GROWING GARDEN

that-is-and-apple-that-is-to-be is open, then is the
time that the waiting caterpillar stealthily crawls
into that calyx to live there as the fruit grows,
unless the careful sprayer has driven into this
open calyx the lead-arsenate mist that will make
the little worm’s first meal his last one. A little
later, the calyx will have closed upon the fertilized
ovaries, and if no poison has met the worm, he is
sheltered and fed at your apple-expense.

To make sure, I have sprayed before the blos-
soms open, in order to protect generally and to
catch any stray bugs that eat or scales that suck;
and again at the critical time after the blossoms
have fallen and while the calyx is open, so as to
both poison and protect. The first spray was a
fine, covering mist, from at least two sides, to
reach every part. The next, and the vital appli-
cation, is with a coarser spray, to get right into
the calyces where Mr. Caterpillar is or is going to
be waiting. For both sprayings I use commercial
lime-sulphur, with lead arsenate stirred in at
the rate of three-fourths of an ounce to a gallon
of the nine-to-one solution, which is a generous
equivalent to four pounds to the hundred gal-
lons (the hundred-gallon prescription is alarming;
how would a plain gardenman get away with two
barrels of this stuff?).

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 79

Here I have to be tedious again, in insisting
that this spraying operation is necessary unless I
am to be willing to run a moth-breeding and bug-
feeding fruit-garden; that it must be done at the
right time and with much care to get a lime-sulphur-
arsenate film over every part of every tree and
into the heart of every past-blossom; and that
to do this the mixing and filtering of the stuff
must be managed about as if I was getting a baby’s
milk ready. No “rough-neck”’ operators will pro-
tect an orchard. It isn’t so much trouble, after
all, especially after I have discovered that it is &
positive “must” operation.

After spraying, it is a relief to turn into the
May garden. These stone steps, alight with the
lovely. blue periwinkle flowers that we miscall
“myrtle” and that are really Vinca minor, remind
me of a failure and a success, the telling of which
will give time for the lime-sulphur smell to evapo-
rate. I saw a similar stone step covered luxuriantly
with the glossy foliage of the Wichuraiana, rose,
and immediately ordered such roses for the home
steps. They came, were planted in the shade,
between the roots of two hemlocks at the top of
the steps where they had no business to be; grew
a little, climbed a little, trailed not at all, and next
year bloomed into pink Lady Gay roses, not white

80 MY GROWING GARDEN

single Wichuraianas. Of course I scolded the
nurseryman; but I saw that no roses would ever
luxuriate in the dry shade of the location.

The next spring I went over-Memorial Day to
loved Eagles Mere of the mountains. There I
found under some old gum trees a mass of the
periwinkle—evidently spread from some chance
plant brought in by a cottager, as it is a native of
Europe and not of America. Some plants were
lifted with care, and with even more care were on
my return set in little pockets along those stone
steps. Instead of just planting them along the
slope, I gouged out a rather deep hole, filled it
with rich soil, and planted the myrtle so that
each plant was in the depression or recess into
which would run any rain falling along the slope.
The plants got busy at once, grew, spread as is
their wont, and have made a rich evergreen mat,
far finer than any grass I could have grown here,
and much better than the rose I started for.

But once down the steps, I turn aside from
Lovers’ Lane after another glimpse at the violets
and trilliums just under the edge of the rhododen-
drons, and pause a moment to get more pleasure
out of the Thunberg barberry hedge, now in
bloom. The lovely arching sprays of foliage in a
half-dozen shades of green are enough in them-

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SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 81

selves to make me glad for this hedge, but now the
long rows of pleasing little yellow flowers, hanging
like bells under the twigs, strengthen my belief
that this is a very worth-while shrub. It is plenty
good enough as a hedge, for no mortal wearing
trousers or skirt can get through it with clothing
whole; it runs a veritable gamut of greens in
earliest spring, and these dainty flowers follow; its
berries come soon, and red, and stay red for all
the fall and winter months; its foliage blazes early
into reds and crimsons, long before frost; and
alter frost has taken the leaves, raindrops hang in
tears from the red berries; while the soft snows
and the sleet-storms do wonders with it all winter.
It has no off days the whole year round.

Here at the garden entrance stands that Pyrus
floribunda I have mentioned, and not far from it
the also previously mentioned Spirea arguta is
yet a white fountain of spraying branches—for it
ties April into May in some seasons.

We walk into the garden along the iris border,
now a mass of purple. What a hardy, hearty
thing is this common “blue flag,’ the German
iris! Growing almost anywhere in any soil, it is
pleasantly formal when out of flower, and gor-
geously informal when in bloom. I use it harshly,
perhaps, fitting and filling with it, giving away

82 MY GROWING GARDEN

great clumps continually; adding varieties of
greater delicacy from time to time; but all the
while reveling in this fine, even if common, old
friend of my boyhood. This same friend has, with
the broad-leaved funkia, made part of the axis
walk a present wonder of bloom and foliage. That
same walk is always a picture vista.

To the left the great old lilacs are now in their
flower glory, and they fairly hum with busy bees.
I have been giving loving care to the old plants,
and they are responding. The finer varieties will
never “touch the spot” like this common “lay-
lock”’ of the countryside.

Off to the east the strawberries are in full
bloom; and if we didn’t think of the luscious fruit
to follow, we would better realize that as a flower-
ing plant this would be of real value. Later,
another strawberry, one of my weed pets, will bloom
in yellow, and follow with its scarlet fruits that
are entirely boy-proof, because they are tasteless.

Not in this part of the garden, but over with
the fruits and vegetables, there are during this
late May two flower shows that are entirely extra,
because the plantings were for food. The flesh
food comes in due course, but the first crop is soul
food, if I may so call a lovely flower display.

The blackberry canes, as I have before said, are

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 83

tied up to a wire trellis, in order that picking may
be easier. Could any flowering shrub give a
more gracious wealth of bloom than does now
this same blackberry row? We should feel fully
square with the plants if they did not follow with
great clusters of glistening fruits in July.

The other extra and much more unexpected
picture is made for us by the plentiful and dainty
white flowers of First of All peas. Grown as an
“eat”? and not a sweet pea, it has nevertheless
given us a brave and beautiful show. The yet
bare trellis of the sweet-pea row indicates that the
hardier vegetable has bloomed far ahead of its
aristocratic sister.

The first dogwoods I planted are now “showing
me,’ and I like to be shown by them! The red-
buds associated with them are not so happy, for
borers have killed one and choked another. Par-
ticularly have these sly creatures worked harm to
the Japanese red-bud, a pet of mine.

Not very many shrubs bloom here in May. The
fine Spirea Van Houtier follows S. arguta, and
Deutzia gracilis, the old “Bridal Wreath,” is at its
best, together with the lovely Lemoine variety.
Van Houttei is most useful, because it will endure
sun or shade, drought or dampness, slope or flat,
blooming everywhere. Just before it, the other

84 MY GROWING GARDEN

important barberry I have—the common or “vul-
garis’—blooms; and I’m glad when it is through
flowering, for it has a bad breath. Of course the
mock oranges are with us; and it is of possible
interest to note that Breeze Hill has varieties of
Philadelphus enough to give us more than a month
of their fine blooms, not counting on the new
Chinese sorts, yet unbloomed. Few garden-makers
yet know what the mock oranges will do for them.
A late visit to the Arnold Arboretum showed me,
last year, what I might hope for.

In the Arboretum bed are a half-dozen new
barberries from China, looking quite interesting,
and one of them devilish, for it has thorns of steel
an inch and more long. Here, too, is the earlier-
mentioned Spirea Henryi, one of Wilson’s pets,
delightful in its first bloom.

The herbaceous plants give life and light to
the growing garden, into which we are constantly
transplanting annuals and perennials these May
days. Arabis, in the early weeks, is lke a hold-
over snow-drift, and the yellow alyssum is a real
golden glow. Another note of yellow is sounded by
the doronicum—I wish I had more of them. A
biennial, the old-fashioned “‘honesty,” planted in
the fall, is for weeks a blaze of pink and magenta.
The first of the peonies, the lovely tenuifolia,

Puate XV. “A gracious wealth of bloom on .. . this same
blackberry row.” (See page 83.)

SPRING BUDS AND BLOOMS 85

opens its crimson blooms in mid-May; I’m sorry
it is sO poor a grower!

I must not forget the tulips. Long since I gave
up the growing of early tulips, concentrating on
some worth-while later sorts. The enduring double
tulips, Murillo and Le Matador, have ushered us
into the west garden entrance in dignity, and later
the brilliant Gesneriana and the superb pink and
white Picotee have troubled us, because we want
to cut them to give away, and we want them as
well to stay to be seen! The Darwins are superb,
in their stately habit, as well as in their sur-
prising range of unusual and delightful colors.
Bouton d’Or is an egg of yellow on a nodding
stem of half a yard, and it is “some tulip.”
This year I am looking for the bloom of some
specialties in the damask and old rug colors found
in the Breeders and in some Darwins, and I have
planted so as to get good contrasts—I hope!

There is a very fury of vegetable activity in
May, both of planting and of growth. We keep
putting in corn of our pet Bantam and Golden-
rod sorts, beans for succession, both “string’’ and
limas of pole and bush designations, spinach and
“sich like.”” This year a number of experimental
vegetables are being grown, about which I can
write later. But one thing I need to say, and that is

86 MY GROWING GARDEN

that we have learned to be exceedingly cruel to the
weeds; we kill them early and often, and the stirred
ground is not allowed to feed their tiny roots.

In a north corner, in almost total shade, I
planted last year a bush of the Carolina rhodo-
dendron sent me by my plant-friend Kelsey. It
has bloomed this May, and it is most lovely, with
its pinkish-white clusters of waxy flowers. It is a
fine addition, from the Appalachian Mountains, to
the rhododendron treasures of Breeze Hill.

Dahlias and cannas have been a resource of my
garden, frost-tender though they are. Planted in
May, both give from dormant roots a superb show
of bloom in late summer and until frost. The loose-
petaled “cactus” dahlias seem to me most attrac-
tive, and the cannas that have resulted from the
patient life-work of my old friend Wintzer are
superb, distinct, and of more garden-value than
anything of Burbank’s I have seen.

The last week of May has been for several
years persuading us to revise the truism that
June is the month of roses, in any exclusive sense.
“Decoration Day” finds many mid-Pennsylvania
gardens ablaze with the bloom of the queen of
flowers, and my garden is among them. We enter
June, therefore, in that mood of mind which the
scent of roses alone can produce.

CHAPTER VI—JUNE
THE FEAST OF FLOWERS

HE beginning of the mid-year month has
two high points in my growing garden. One
is a point of roses; the other of strawberries.

We were shown, several years ago, how straw-
berries may mean quite as much as roses. It was
when we took up residence at Breeze Hill, the
mansion-house still in the hands of the lingering
mechanics. The “‘flitting’—that is, the final cut-
ting off from the old city-street home—took place
on the first day of June. All day the wagons had
passed between the two houses, the mile of sepa-
ration being doubled by the muddy roads. It was a
weary couple who fronted the last load of final
odds and ends, gathered up before the key was
turned on the home that had been ours for more
than eighteen years, and the old horse that drew
us also seemed weary. Thoughtful for the morrow’s
breakfast, the good wife had me stop en route and
buy some strawberries offered on a street stand.
Jogging along, tired, a little “blue” from over-
doing, we wondered as to the future in a new

(87)

88 MY GROWING GARDEN

home, which at that moment seemed notable prin-
cipally for the inconvenience of its approaches.
As we turned into “Lovers’ Lane,” then an un-
kempt driveway, and came in sight of the west
house-door, our neighbor, Mr. H.,—whose father
had built, thirty-five years before, the old house
we were now to live in,—stepped out of the path
to his home, and held up his hand to stop us.
Then, saying “Welcome!” he handed me a box
of strawberries, just picked, apologizing that they
were not larger, and telling us they were the first
of the season from his plants.

Not larger! Why, there were but sixteen berries
in the heaped-up quart of ruddy scarlet, dressed
with fresh, soft foliage! And each one was more
than a strawberry—it was an event! The volume
of kindliness and friendly courtesy crowded into
that quart box could never be measured in cubic
contents; it was beyond any material dimension.

Of course the sun shone for us instantly, despite
the impending rain. Smiles broke out as we
thanked this real neighbor for more than he ever
knew that he gave, fine though his giving was.
Blithely we unloaded the wagon; cheerily we took
our way into the yet unordered new home. The
evening was rose-colored; the blues had vanished;
Breeze Hill was “all right!”

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exquisite, enduring.

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 89

All through the evening meal we gazed at those
strawberries. They were entirely too good to
eat, and no sheaf of American Beauty roses could
have meant so much. The next morning they
were partaken of by all the family in a sort of
reverent pledge, as a very definite good omen, as
a promise for the future of good—spiritual as well
as material—from the garden, and of good will
from our neighbor.

That second day gave the rose high-point. In
my goings-about on the place previous to actual
living there, I had always to be concerned with
the doings of mechanics. Lines for grading, and
the general scheme for the garden, had been
worked out on the place, yet mostly a mass of
debris, weeds, brush, decrepit grape-vines, and
dead pear trees. I thought I knew all about the
growth, however; wherefore my surprise may be
imagined when, on this second June day, the
daughter of the house came in, saying, “Did you
see the rose-garden?”

No, I had not seen the rose-garden; and was
not she joking? She waved in my direction a
great, full flower, assuredly not a joke, and led
me to it—the rose-garden! In a corner east of the
great sycamore, quite concealed from the house,
and seemingly so shaded as to be all wrong for

90 MY GROWING GARDEN

roses, there was an irregular-shaped bed, solid
with old-fashioned roses, and just then breaking
into a perfect glory of bloom. One “‘General Jacq.”
there was, to my recognition; but the remainder
were of sorts I knew nothing of. Ragged, tangled,
thorny, overgrown, there was yet a mass of wild
loveliness that was as delightful as it was surpris-
ing. Thus came the second “Welcome,” without
words, but speaking to us that which words could
not compass.

Inquiry developed that these roses had been
planted more than twenty-five years before, and
no inquiry was needed to show the neglect through
which they had survived. Since then, that bed of
old roses, in that impossibly shady nook, has had
abundant care, and it is made over. Each year
great canes grow up, bearing in the June-time
rich clusters of musky fragrance, in our old-fash-
ioned rose-garden.

Conditions and preferences have united to give
the rose a dominating place in this growing garden.
I have mentioned the regret with which I gave up
the idea of a rose-hedge, consoling myself with an
inside hedge about a hundred feet long, and an
arbor for climbers to weave upon, as well as with
various beds and borders for the hybrid teas,
polyanthas and other favorites.

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 91

This raw, red, unfertile-looking shale seems to
have in it something besides the liberally added
manure that roses like, to judge by the growing
that the climbers have done. When I look at the
photographic record of the bare rose-arbor, made
in September of the year we moved in, and then
at another photograph made in June of the second
year after, I can hardly believe what I see. And
when I remember that the awful ten-below-zero
winds of the next winter cut those roses down
almost to the ground, the way they got busy and
re-covered the arbor in one season seems also
unbelievable. Lady Gay, Hiawatha, W. C. Egan,
and Alberic Barbier are the names of the sisterhood
of sturdy loveliness that have done this great
growing and blooming.

Leuchstern, at the eastern front of the arbor,
has not grown so vigorously, but its bloom has
been so copious, so exquisite, so enduring, each
year, that I cannot ask more of it. Clusters that
in substance and coloration surpass the rhododen-
drons they resemble stay in perfection through
almost two weeks, after they have been as fine as
any ordinary rose for many days.

My wife and I are divided as to which of the
two dominant roses of the long hedge are most
impressive. Both are, probably; the Climbing

92 MY GROWING GARDEN

American Beauty for its size, color, form and mass
of bloom, and the Tausendschon for its daintiness
and variety in pink and white, as well as for its
marvelous clusters. It was this “Thousand Beau-
ties’ rose that started the idea of the particular
sort of rose-hedge I have worked out. At first
the supporting wires were less than three feet
from the ground, but my rose friend Robert Pyle
told me, after his memorable rose-summer in
Europe, that Tausendschon did best at its German
home when its graceful branches might droop their
-flower-laden length from a high post. Promptly I
set up a proper post for the rose; and then, for
symmetry’s sake, did the same at five other points.
All the roses were viciously thorny, save only
Tausendschén; and when I tied them up that
winter, I saw that more spread was needed, if only
to give chance to avoid thorns. So I bought brass
chain, and looped it from each post summit to a
proper point on the hedge wire to give a graceful
slope, after which, and all through one season, the
roses were trained into and along this weathered
chain and the space below it. The next season
showed the effectiveness of the plan, for the bloom-
ing result was most beautiful.

Near the Tausendschon, another plant of Alberic
Barbier had been set. It has worked all through

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THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 93

its neighbor and into the scheme admirably, for
its creamy buds come almost with the rose of ten
hundred beauties, and its darkly glossy foliage
helps the mass effect.

Coming later than Climbing American Beauty,
and at another opening in the hedge, American
Pillar has developed into a magnificent plant,
which covers itself with great single flowers that
range from vivid carmine to a clean pale pink, and
that last long in loveliness. A White Dorothy
has arched with it, and Mrs. Flight, really a pink
rambler, blooms into the same mass. California
has nothing on Breeze Hill in rose masses or rose
effect during most of June!

Opposite Climbing American Beauty is a great
Lady Gay, but this rose is really here quite unlady-
like in its disposition. It seems to be a mildew-
inviter, and my sprayings with potassium sulphide
in the accepted English method do not seem to
keep the Lady in good health. This means that I
shall have to substitute another rose for this or
any other climber that has a predisposition for
mildew.

Another climbing rose is “up and coming” in
my garden. It is Excelsa, as truly American as
the one with the Beauty name or as the Pillar
sort. Its raiser, Mr. Walsh, is a much more useful

94 MY GROWING GARDEN

“wizard” than Burbank, for his roses prove out
their quality, distinction and sturdiness over a
wide range. This Excelsa is a curious red. At
first 1t seems rather pale, but all at once you realize
its brilliance, and then its complete superiority to
Crimson Rambler, the first of this type. Excelsa
is a wonderful grower, and it has no penchant for
mildew. Moreover, it blooms late; in a north
exposure on our front lawn was fine last year in
early July. (See frontispiece.) :

When I send my memory back to the old home
garden of thirty years ago, where Baltimore Belle
and Prairie Queen were about the only hardy
climbers, I see that we do much better with these
lovely roses of now, giving us variety in habit,
form and color, fragrance and foliage. To be sure,
we might have an everblooming climber; but did
you ever think, Mr. Wishful Rosarian, that when
that desired everbloomer comes, it will not have
the great and glorious burst of bloom that char-
acterizes these of June fullness?

At the very beginning of the month, and indeed
coming over from May, were shown in this garden
the fine “rugosa hybrids,”’ as are called those bred
between that Japanese rose and certain favorites.
Of them Agnes Emily Carman (what an overload
of name for one rose!) was notable because its

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 95

crimson blooms hung down to certain Felix Crousse
peonies, matching almost precisely their bright
hue. Nova Zembla was dainty in pink, and Mad.
Georges Bruant pure in white; and all of them,
strong, sturdy and with rich foliage, able to stand
the hot afternoon sun in which they must open
here. It is in this race that we are to have the
hardy everblooming bush roses, I believe.

The stately and full white Druschki, the con-
tinuously performing Teplitz and all the other
worth-while hybrid teas, have made June a very
vigorous rose month at Breeze Hill. I find that
visitors are likely to think most of Climbing
American Beauty, which is probably as it should
be; for certainly Europe never sent us so fine a
flower, so rich a color, so sturdy a grower. That
Irish propagator, not at all a scientific sharp, but
very much a loving worker in roses, who at West
Chester brought into existence this best of red
climbing roses, has done the north a real service.
And his fame is not dependent on one rose; for
Christine Wright is the name of his pink beauty,
and Purity properly designates his exquisite white
production, rivaling American Beauty in form and
vigor.

But June is not all roses, by any means, in this
growing garden. It is strawberries, as I have said,

96 MY GROWING GARDEN

and good strawberries, too. It is currants, and
they are both big and good and worth while for
their winter jam-possibilities. It is such peas as
never came out of any market basket; for Gradus
peas, plucked from the vines an hour before dinner,
are not to be discussed in terms of ordinary vege-
tables. This shortened time between the plant
and the table seems to mean that the ordinarily
poor, smooth, extra-early peas may be delicious as
were the First of All that were actually first of all,
though planted second. They matured in sixty-
one days from planting. Then came Gradus, and
Little Marvel; but not then the hoped-for succes-
sion upon Mr. Kruhm’s ingenious scheme. Thomas
Laxton crept up on his date some, Potlatch forgot
its cue, and made a false entry, while Telephone
and Champion of England came in hand-in-hand,
as it were, rather than tandem. There were peas
galore for part of June, and even a pea-crank like
myself is satisfied with peas twice a day; but by
July first none were available. Six weeks of peas
was the paper scheme; two weeks and a day or so
over the ground production.

In June, red raspberries follow strawberries;
and if a better raspberry than the old Cuthbert
has appeared outside a catalogue, I don’t know of
it! My plants of the “everbearing” sort didn’t

7
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Puare XVIII. “An ounce of Shirley poppy seed . . . sowed along
an eighty-foot border . . . in mid-June came
days of poppy glory.” (See page 97.)

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 97

bear at all, so I have yet to get some knowledge of
them. The fall-bearing strawberries—but wait till
fall, please; this is not the place for that story.

The old part of this growing garden gave us
sour cherries in abundance last year, and the good
wife put some of them into that finest of winter
table relishes, cherry “butter.” I cannot describe
it; there isn’t any thing to compare its taste with;
but when it comes on the table, that meal is an
Occasion!

But enough of berries and peas and other flesh
food; let me return to the real spirit of June, the
flower spirit! Thrice I have had an over-winter
poppy feast. An ounce of Shirley poppy seed,
“diluted” with a pint of sifted soil, was sowed
earefully about the second week in December along
an eighty-foot border, next the barberry hedge.
In May there was an hour of weeding, an hour of
thinning; and in mid-June came days of poppy
glory, with flowers of red and pink and white and
salmon, all of the texture one might expect to find
in a fairy’s wings. Very early in the morning,
before the sun was high enough to steam off the
dewdrops, this border, with every flower fresh
open, was something to thank God for! Forty
cents’ worth of seed, about four hours’ work in all,
for nearly fourteen days of generous bloom seemed

98 MY GROWING GARDEN

to me very much worth while. And the third
time was even less labor and more bloom, for I
omitted the sowing, and the flowers that came
anyway used some of the manure dug into that
border after the poppy time to double their size.
They were entirely volunteers, and seemingly with
spirit accordingly, in contrast to the conscription
of prosaic seed sowing.

At a right angle to the poppy border, and also
along the barberry hedge, a long planting of sweet
william has been a lovely June feature. Even if it
didn’t bloom at all, this old favorite would be
desirable because it is such a cheerful and con-
venient ground cover, standing more shade than
is reasonable. I am this year trying it out in
separate colors, but I may be disappointed in the
bloom effect—can any flower mass show more rich-
ness than a good mixed strain of this dianthus ?

Breeze Hill does not as yet boast of a really
good peony garden. The reason is purely financial;
for I find I have a troublesomely expensive taste in
peonies. I had an idea that all these more expensive
sorts, of the noted growers, represented principally
the fancier’s taste. I was “‘shown,”’ and by myself!
One memorable June I went with several flower
friends, one a language-slinging professor of horti-
culture in an eastern college, to visit Farr’s great

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 99

six-acre peony gardens. Full of my idea, I pro-
posed to my friends that we select, one after an-
other, as we looked across the wonderful fields, the
flowers that stood out as superior for some definite
reason of form, color or bloom habit. Without
looking at labels, we were then to walk to the
selected plants, again discuss the “points,” and if
we agreed, we would find the label and record the
name, also jotting down the reasons for our
preferences.

We selected thus some fourteen sorts out of
fully three hundred, wrote our memoranda, and
then hunted up Mr. Farr. Whew! Several of the
sorts were so rare as not yet to be in commerce,
but the others could be had—at from one dollar
to six dollars per plant! We had not cared for
one of the old sorts, available at the lower
prices. So, convinced that there is something in
the fancier’s selection, I’m rather waiting until
these that I want are within reach. Meanwhile,
some peonies are growing splendidly for me, and
I have had time to note that they are of a settled
disposition, preferring not to be often moved, and
rewarding one for much nearby manure-food.
Indeed, much food and water at right times will
probably give my “common” sorts strong char-
acter and great beauty. |

100 MY GROWING GARDEN

June is an iris month, too. Some of the German
iris hang over from May—especially the blue-laced
Madame Chereau, along the garden wall. The
Spanish iris, loveliest of late-blooming fall-planted
bulbs, gives a fine and a different show for
little cost. It has some shadings of dull yellow, of
smoky salmon, of “old gold” and light brown, that
are singularly attractive, while its blues and whites
and lemons are clean and clear. The English iris
follow, with mostly blue shades, and the unique
and delightful Japanese sorts carry over into July.
The earlier-blooming Siberian iris seems rather
weedy in this garden.

Herbaceous plants are in full evidence. The
old-time valerian, or “vanilla,” rears its stately
blooms at the same time that the foxgloves are at
their best—and a superb best! A garden without
white foxgloves is weak. They stand up against
the green of the arborvites in their old-fashioned
way. Nearby a chance combination of Campanula
Medium and the low red heuchera is so fine that
it must occur again. There are blues in these cam-
panulas, and in the beautiful stokesias and ver-
onicas, but the delphinium blues are best of all.

The note of yellow in June is struck by the
cenotheras, the “evening primroses,” plants of
vigor and beauty that may quickly become weeds.

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THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 101

Hemerocallis and coreopsis carry the same hue,
while the lychnis touches the border with scarlet.

The lovely white Laliwm candidum comes into
full stateliness here past the middle of June, and
is not merely desirable in itself, but because it
lends light and contrast to anything near it. I
want more; but it increases rather slowly. Not
far away, and blooming about the same time, the
long-spurred columbines are a great pleasure. The
Boston strain I have grown gives colors so soft
and refined that the bed of them has the same
effect of richness that one sees in those flowers of
wool that the old eastern devotees created in a
prayer-rug. These columbines last long, too; for
many weeks there will be flowers in abundance.

I am fond of gladioli, but have had to plant
them very late to avoid the vacation weeks.
Loving this growing garden as we do, we cannot
quite stay away from Eagles Mere, our Penn-
sylvania mountain summer home; wherefore there
is needed especially careful planning and planting
to give us September “posies,” and not to have
our favorites fall into flower in late July or August.
I find that gladioli planted the last week in June
come into bloom in September.

The cannas, planted early in the month, begin
to grow vigorously as the ground gets thoroughly

102 MY GROWING GARDEN

warm. I have those wonderful “lily’’-cannas origi-
nated by that cunning plant-worker, Antoine
Wintzer, and they are worth having, assuredly.

June is surely a shrub month too! Greatest of
all is the rhododendron, toward the end of the
month, in its waxy elegance. Just ahead my few
plants of the laurel—which is to be the national
flower of America if my friend Henry Turner
Bailey can have his wise way—give their corner
a pink and white glow. They need, I observe,
some sun to bloom well; the more complaisant
rhododendron will illumine almost total shade
with its blooms. Both must have leaf-mulch
about their roots to prosper here, and the hose
has soaked those roots several times in June.

The later lilacs and mock oranges are to be seen,
and the weigelas and spireas. Of the latter, the
new Chinese sort, Spirea Henryi, previously men-
tioned, has bloomed, this month, in a most distinct
and attractive way, and is undoubtedly a really
valuable addition.

I am especially proud of a lovely Styrax japonica
that is growing freely, and blooming its dainty
bells as it grows; for it is one of the over-
looked shrubs. It flourishes here in a half-shaded
corner, somewhat sheltered from the cruel west
wind.

THE FEAST OF FLOWERS 103

Not to specifically mention one mock orange,
Philadelphus Lemoinet var. Avalanche, would be
unjust to it and to my garden friends. It is one
of the sorts “made in France,” but from two
American species, by the patient wonder-worker
at Nancy. The name “Avalanche” describes it
fully; it is a snowstorm, a cascade of white flowers
for two weeks. There are other of these Lemoine
mock-oranges coming along, extending the sea-
son and showing desirable variations in size and
form of flower. I am inclined to believe that a
proper selection of the Philadelphuses will give
more delightful and fragrant white flowers in
early summer than most planters suspect.

The Japanese honeysuckle is a weed in the
neighborhood of Breeze Hill, having evidently
“escaped” years ago. One great specimen has
flung its persistent branches and tendrils over a
nearly rotten tree-stump right at the carriage
stone, and it has been most of June almost intoxi-
cating both to the eye and the nose. I have
propped the old stump, and pruned the old honey-
suckle, hoping to have both last long. Along
the curved Hillside Road front of the Breeze Hill
boundary, outside, this same honeysuckle has
made green and lovely a rough shale slope.

The garden is an exacting mistress in June, and

104 MY GROWING GARDEN

sometimes when I straighten my aching back, and
drop the hoe or the hose, I wish I might be visit-
ing it rather than working in it. And I note its
deficiencies and failures and difficulties all too
clearly, I suppose, inasmuch as visitors pass them
by, either from charity or ignorance, or both.
But when I look about and see it grow under my
unacquainted hands; when I have the fine pleas-
ure each morning of seeing what God’s way in a
garden is, in the birth of some jewel of his over
night; when I inhale the fragrant breath of the
new-mown lawn, or get at even the soft incense that
only then arises from the ground; then I know
that the work is all profit, and the weariness a
trifle. I am in, and of, a growing garden!

“The Japanese honeysuckle . . . has flung its
branches and tendrils over a tree-stump.”’ (See page 103.)

CHAPTER VI—JULY
THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES

** AND the Lord God planted a garden east-
ward in Eden; . . . and out of the ground
made the Lord God to grow every tree that

is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.” So

runs the story of the first garden on this earth,
which I here transcribe to call attention to the
order of importance attached to its product.

“Pleasant to the sight’—that came first in a gar-

den—and then “good for food.’’ Man was to have

his garden, if he followed the example of the

Creator, first a delight to see, and then productive

of the necessaries of life.

If any authority were needed for treating of
flowers first in my growing garden, it would thus
be easy to cite. I do cite it, however, not merely
to put food in its proper relation, but to put it in at
all. Many who think they love gardens affect to
despise the vegetables and the fruits, and thus miss
the completeness that God’s garden predicated,
both in beauty and in usefulness.

In a notable way, and with an enlarged vision,

(105)

106 MY GROWING GARDEN

both eye and appetite may be served simulta-
neously. A garden of vegetables is to me a beautiful
thing, if it is a good garden. The tendrils of the
pea that is sweet to the taste are as daintily cling-
ing, and as I have before said and shown, its
flowers are but less conspicuous than those of the
pea that is wholly ornamental. Few plants in the
flower border produce foliage so delicately cut or so
decorative in greenery as that of the carrot. Yellow
beans are handsome as they hang from well-
grown plants, and a row or a field of celery is a
pleasing sight. Well-trained tomato plants, hung
with red fruits, are brilliantly decorative, and
peppers are as much so. And what exotic even
approaches the stately tropical beauty of maize,
or corn; what sight in any flower garden, or what
scent, surpasses the sight and the scent of that same
corn as the morning breeze of a warm summer day
plays over it?

I have stoutly maintained that from the appear-
ance standpoint I have a complete right to mix
my plantings of vegetables and flowers and fruits,
if I like. So parsley has, in my growing garden,
edged a border, and lettuce as well; so the prize
row of sweet peas ran next a row of grape-vines
one year; so the cosmos succeeded and supple-
mented the foliage of the asparagus border; so my

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 107

pet poppy bed of four-score feet has been close to
a planting of potatoes.

Alas, the potato! Writing the word brings
mournful memory of my repeated and increas-
ingly disastrous potato failures. The first spring at
Breeze Hill potatoes were planted as a matter of
course, and a moderate crop secured. The second
season they were planted as a matter of winter
food; more of them, in better ground; but the bugs,
allowed to get a start, made the result mediocre.
The third season I took much trouble to see to it
that conditions were right, as I thought, for a
model potato crop. The early showing was most
good-looking and promising, being seemingly about
ideal. Bugs came, but were promptly picked or
poisoned. Then suddenly the blight descended,
and just wiped out that potato patch, despite
frantic spraying.

Last season, my combativeness aroused, I took
every possible precaution in preparing to grow a
small area of potatoes on the intensive plan.
Fresh ground, the best on the place, subsoiled with
dynamite; an approved chemical fertilizer; selected
seed, carefully cut; planting of the most pains-
taking character. All these, and then opportune
rains to start the tubers—but they didn’t start
to any reasonabie extent. The vacant spaces were

108 MY GROWING GARDEN

replanted with seed soaked in formalin to ward
off “‘scab,”’ and as any foliage got four or five
inches high it was sprayed and sprayed and
sprayed. Bugs? They never had a chance! Weeds?
Neither did they have any peace in which to start
or to grow. But eventual potatoes? Not so many
as went into the ground as seed, alas!

Of course I have not lacked the telling why,
from many wiseacres. Ground too rich, ground
too poor; fertilizer should have been strewn to the
left instead of the right; planted in the wrong
aspect of the moon; they were grown flat, they
were hilled too much; too much cultivating, too
much spraying—and so on. But when the con-
ditions were carefully detailed to a competent
Cornell professor, he frankly said he didn’t know
why, except that none of the reasons I have men-
tioned were effective.

This year I am growing my potatoes somewhere
else, with plain “greenback’’ fertilizer, permitting
some one else to do the spraying and the “bug-
ging.” I have planted a row of one of the very early
sorts, in the hope that such a little bit of a planting
may miss the blight patrols, and allow us to have
for the July table those smooth little tubers, half-
grown, that are a delicacy rather than a food
staple.

ne ee

a beautiful thing, if it isa

sis
good garden.”’ (See page 106.)

PuaTteE XXI. “A garden of vegetable

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 109

Really, the title of this chapter is inaccurate,
for we do not have in July a “feast” of vegetables
in the sense of variety—that comes in September,
after we are home from Eagles Mere, and when
some weeks of hotel eating, with the can-opener
working overtime, have prepared us to appreciate
the fresh delights of our home garden. Yet July
is a feast month for vegetables, because it opens
the season for several that we like. The first
“string beans—so called, I presume, because we
wouldn’t touch them if they weren’t entirely
stringless!—are now available, and are good to
eat; very good. Always we grow too many of
them, and give away too few, so that there is a
waste of good food. Why could I hand my friend
a good cigar—if I used the dead things myself !—
with assurance of his courteous acceptance, and be
afraid to send him enough crisp yellow beans to
give him and his family a vegetable treat they can
not obtain for themselves in any market? His
wife will eat contentedly of a box of candy on the
living-room table when she calls, but might enter-
tain the suspicion that we were considering her an
object of charity if we offered her a bunch of fresh,
crisp radishes, ten minutes out of the ground.
Something is wrong in our sense of proportion, I
think. Perhaps I shall acquire courage eventually,

110 MY GROWING GARDEN

to contribute surplus vegetables to the tables of
my friends, just as I now gladly cut for them the
more difficult flowers which they as gladly carry
away. %

In the garden of my boyhood home there was
a tradition that “roasting ears” of sweet corn—
which were never roasted—might be had by
July fourth, to celebrate Independence Day.
Sweet corn by name, but not by nature, is in the
markets here in early July, but the real thing does
not happen often before mid-month. One year I
hurried up some corn grains in pots by planting
them in my good neighbor’s greenhouse, and visions
of early maturity possessed me, notwithstanding
a wiseacre statement that corn could not be trans-
planted. It was transplanted, when the ground
was of a kindly temperature, and it grew. But
strange to say, the outdoor-sown first planting of the
same sort grew faster, much faster; and yet stranger
to say, the poor-growing early transplanted corn
formed ears sooner, and did give us our first taste
about five days ahead of the far lustier natural —
planting!

That first taste of Golden Bantam corn—how
sweet, how toothsome, how entirely delicious!
That is, if it is picked in the home garden, not
more than an hour before it makes its steaming

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 111

appearance upon the table; I am not referring to
mere market or restaurant corn, such as gardenless
unfortunates must put up with. The home-raised
article pays more of the debt my garden owes me
than any other of its productions, I am sure; and I
am intending to have a large debit balance of that
sort here, with these excellent yellow sorts matur-
ing in succession. Goldenrod has been as delight-
ful to eat, and somewhat more liberal in its pro-
duction; but the very earliest must be the saucy
Bantam.

During later July the bush lima beans come
into sufficient size to be used, and they mark the
second high point of garden reward for the month.
Like sweet corn and peas, these beans lose flavor
rapidly after they are picked, and we figure at
Breeze Hill to have no advance gathering, but to
hurry them from the plants through the kitchen
to the table. Between the lima beans of any out-
rageous-priced metropolitan restaurant and these
confections of my garden there is a difference as
between a poor picture of a rose and the actual
flower. There is a resemblance of appearance only,
but not of satisfaction.

Why is it that some great restaurant in a great
city does not specialize on fresh, really fresh, vege-
tables, well cooked, and not doped with sauces so

112 MY GROWING GARDEN

that one can notice little difference between peas
and potatoes? The existing exalted prices might
even be increased, if there was the intention to
produce the article, so far as it could be produced.
The prevailing idea of the restaurateurs seems to
be to make vegetables so undesirable in taste, and
so costly in money, that they will entirely give
way to flesh foods. Of course, in this unwar-
ranted observation I am referring only to the
grosser and transportable vegetables like some
beans, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes and
the like, and not to the higher literature, so to
speak, of evanescently flavored peas, beans, corn
and some others—they belong only to the actual
gardeners, and are quite impossible to ordinary
commerce.

Celery has proved to be one of the vegetables
that find encouraging conditions in the rough shale
of this garden. In this July month it is our custom
to transplant several rows of the previously grown
little “‘celeriets,’’ and to watch them and to water
them with the completest care until they are
accustomed to the change and enjoying the hot
sun. At first I had deep trenches dug, with the cor-
responding deeper soil preparation, so that the
little plants were in a narrow valley until the
laborious “‘earthing’”’ later had leveled them. This

Puate XXII. ‘Consider the hollyhock; how it grows!”
(See page 120.)

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 113

is no longer the plan pursued; for careful tests
showed no superiority in the final product, and
there was a deal of back-breaking labor required .to
do the filling properly. Hereafter I will use level
culture altogether, with all the manure in the soil
that will seem to mix with it. The little plants will
be carefully sorted as to size, and as carefully
trimmed in both root and top, so that the first
hard days may not require so much water trans-
piration. If Jupiter Pluvius favors us with a con-
venient shower, that will prosper the planting;
but Agua Susquehanniensis applied through a
hose and by way of the notable “lawn-mist”
sprinkler, that makes water dust to float through
the air to the ground, will do nearly as well. There
are enough partly read daily newspapers to do
any needed shading service for a day or so, and
thus to justify themselves more completely of their
lurid news, which won’t hurt the celery!

July is a berry month here. The first days see
the end of an abundant strawberry crop, usually,
though last year those fall-bearers;—but there,
I’m getting ahead of my story again! There have
been more of those delicious Cuthbert raspberries,
and a great crop of blackberries. Both the latter
have done better, and are less cruel to the picker
with their thorns, since I have tied them down

114 MY GROWING GARDEN

upon a simple wire trellis, about three feet high.
In the Maytime, the blackberry row, which runs
close to the barberry hedge, was, as I have pic-
tured previously, a mass of white blossoms quite
as decorative as anything planted primarily for
decoration; and these great clusters of ripening
fruit, set about with luxuriant foliage, now give a
more colorful decoration.

The young bunches of grapes need bagging
attention before mid-July. Each year convinces
more completely of the value of inserting the cluster
of little green globes into a grocer’s two-pound bag,
which is torn down at the top about an inch in two
places, folded carefully over the bunch-carrying
twig, and then pinned fast with two pins—brass
pins if you are likely to get temper-ruffled at the
prick of a rusty iron pin in the fall. The grapes are
thus protected against bugs, birds and bipeds,
at least partially; and they ripen more completely,
have thinner skin, sweeter juice, and will keep
many weeks longer.

The apricot tree, carefully sprayed, has given
us some fine fruit this month, and that incidental
mulberry has begun its rather long tour of fruit-
ing duty. It has the pleasant way of ripening its
berries in succession, so that about any time for a
month I may be sure of finding them within reach

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 115

overhead in just the exact and spicily delicious
state of pre-ripeness that I like. Above in the tree
the birds see that none go to waste, but below
many fall to the ground in that over-ripeness which
has given the mulberry a poor reputation.

Writing of birds reminds me that last year the
blackbirds, otherwise called the purple grackles,
and more often and quite properly: called a con-
founded nuisance, departed in a body on July first.
Their absence is most gratifying; for their habits
are not nice, their noise is most unmelodious,
and their impudence quite aggravating. I have
been awakened at three o’clock in the morning by
the beginning of their squawking overture, the last
notes of which had been heard long after sun-
down the night before. When hundreds have set-
tled at once in the “front”? horse-chestnut, the
hose has been turned upon them, to their enjoy-
ment; and a vicious-looking moving scarecrow in
the big sycamore merely formed for them a satis-
factory roost. My bird-friends, the inveterate
Audubonists Mrs. Wright and Mr. Chapman,
both recommend a shot-gun; but here my nerve
fails!

These grackles have not been able either to
scare away or starve out all the other and better
birds. The many robins that have evidently con-

116 MY GROWING GARDEN

sidered this place home for a long time are quite
able to hold their own against the glossy black
noise-makers. The robins are extraordinarily tame,
and build nests where they oughtn’t to. One was
in a corner of the rose-arbor, within easy reach,
and where Mrs. Robin felt it at first necessary
to get off her eggs and address remarks to me
every time I walked through the arbor. She
accepted me as part of the scenery, after a while,
but flew and scolded for others. Another, even.
more daringly arranged her egg-home inside the
big Climbing American Beauty rose, right at the
sun-dial center of garden traffic, and she surely
had an abundance of exercise while incubating, as
visitors passed within three feet! Yet another con-
cluded that the one suitable place for her family-
rearing work was the branch of a Norway spruce
overhanging the walk to the kitchen door along
which passed the butcher, the baker, the ice-man
and other service visitors. But, somehow, in
God’s bird providence, they all pulled through.
It is my good wife who is bird-wise, not I. She
notes the first golden flash of the oriole, and sees
the brown creeper and the nuthatch chase up and
down the tree trunks. To my duller eyes she
showed the brown thrasher, on his first melodious
visit; but I didn’t need her help to hear the flicker

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rhododendron is in full bloom.’’ (See page 117.)

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 117

set off his alarm-clock on the tin roof at 3.20 A.M.
The rascal! He does it because he enjoys the
fine effect he can thus produce as compared with
his proper love-drumming upon a hollow tree. Our
neighbor was completely taken in by this stylish
fellow’s rat-a-tat-tat at the same early hour. His
wife heard what she supposed was an emergency
knock at the door by someone who couldn’t
find the electric bell-button in the dim dawn, and
she aroused her drowsy “hubby.” Just as he
reached consciousness, Mr. Flicker knocked again,
and my friend, hastily opening the window, called
out “Who’s there?” which of course insured the
silence of the tapping aviator. Grumblingly Mr.
a repeated his query, adding a few somewhat
inelegant remarks about anyone who would knock
and not answer, before he again hit his pillow. It
was later that day, upon comparing notes, that he
learned just who his caller was, somewhat to his
discomfiture.

All spring and summer the birds are a joy at
Breeze Hill, which has evidently, by reason of its
large trees, long been on the northern Riviera of the
summer migration route. We are glad!

At the beginning of the month the great rho-
dodendron—Rhododendron maximum—is in full
bloom. With the particular and painstaking trans-

118 MY GROWING GARDEN

planting before described, I have been able to
make this regal evergreen shrub feel very much at
home at Breeze Hill. Would anyone suppose that
these great plants had been only fifteen months
away from the wild? And how they help in the
working out of my picture vistas!

That worth-while hydrangea, the one with the
portentous botanical cognomen of H. arborescens
var. grandiflora, is in full flower in early July. It is
far more graceful than the common paniculata
grandiflora which has been so greatly overplanted
in the United States, and blooms earlier. In a
half-shady place where the morning sun reaches it,
it grows rapidly and blooms superbly. “Hills of
Snow” is one impossible “common” name it
suffers under; and various nurserymen hitch vari-
ous adjectives to it in addition. Sometimes it has
the botanical name of Hydrangea arborescens
sterilis, but according to Professor Sargent the
grandiflora name is the proper one.

Name aside, it is a most excellent shrub, with
many merits. I find that it resents full sun, and
that with morning shade and afternoon sun it is
quite uncomfortable. It will bloom and grow in
nearly complete shade, though not so vigorously.

Some other early hydrangeas are in the Arbore-
tum bed, and stray blooms suggest their value when

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 119

large enough to develop character. The lovely
native radiata has flourished since I moved it from
its place in the sun, giving its pleasing flowers in
early July, and its more pleasing leaf show every
time the breeze turned their silver under sides
upward for a moment.

A July shrub notability in this part of the world
is the bloom of the dwarf horse-chestnut—sculus
parviflora. It is most striking and impressive,
even on the little plant that took three years to
start, and then astonished us this July.

Of the pink summer-blooming spireas, Anthony
Waterer and Margarit are worth while, because
they add color, while providing no such burst of
bloom as do the spring-blooming varieties. ©

The sweet peas give us their opening effort
right after July fourth. In the Breeze Hill years
the results have been various, but never entirely
bad. One year the two-foot trench, the rich soil,
the trellis and the weather—especially the latter—
were evidently quite pleasing to Madame Sweet
Pea, for she came early and numerously, and
stayed long with us. Of a July morning, before Old
Sol had gotten into his full heat-stride, the mass of
new-opened and really sweet pea-flowers was as
showy as the June blackberry-row blossoms, and
far more interesting in detail. These newer Spen-

120 MY GROWING GARDEN

cer sorts are wonderfully fine and large. As I have
previously remarked, I now prefer more, of less
sorts, rather than to grow many kinds. 3

_ We pick, and pick, and pick these sweet peas,
knowing full well that they will give us more
flowers if we take more, and fewer if we permit
nature to quickly complete the reproductive cycle
by making seeds. Yet they get away from us; for
the bloom abundance is surprising.

I have tried to imitate the presumably perfect
English methods by deep preparation, rich soil,
plenty of water; and, after the plants are in bud,
by a heavy mulch of dried grass to shade the soil
and keep the roots cool. Yet before long the vines
die out along the lower part, and the flowers soon
dry up. What matter? We’ve had a perfect glory
of bloom, and sweet peas galore have graced our
home and the homes of our friends.

Consider the hollyhock; how it grows! It seems
both to toil and to spin, and then in result to be
clothed in a gorgeousness to which the Solomon’s
glory would be mere manufacture. It is called an
*‘old-fashioned”’ flower, for some reason, as if there
were any really new-fashioned flowers on this old
earth; yet the hollyhocks of today are entirely
‘up-to-date’ in clear color, fine form and in the
plant’s stately habit. It is the finest of the spire-

THE FEAST OF VEGETABLES 121

like plants of ready growth. My hollyhocks
are all descended from one strain of seed sown
five years ago, and not yet deteriorating. Some
years the old plants seem intending to be per-
ennial, but I am safe in sowing seed every year
upon the basis of a biennial treatment of the
hollyhock.

The “Shasta” daisy—a Burbanked form of the
field daisy—is a fine July flower, which if often
transplanted and divided, and given much manure
and much water, will in reward produce a sheet
of glorified blooms worth having. It holds the
center of the garden stage in July, and it is sup-
ported by salpiglossis and other good annuals.
About the same time Miss Petunia makes her
bow, and a pleasant courtesy it is, repeated daily
until Jack Frost stiffens her bloom muscles.

“My Lady Nicotine” refers to a smelly pipe, I
believe, in literary truth; but I prefer to attach
that name to the delightful sweet nicotiana,
which also in July begins its daily evening per-
formance, to last until the same Mr. J. Frost
assumes entire charge. In the half-hour follow-
ing the summer sunset, if the evening is still,
there pervades in the garden the fragrance of this
better tobacco, and its white flowers that open
only when the sun has declined are as the garments

122 MY GROWING GARDEN

of a fairy. On summer moonlight nights this Lady
Nicotine is queen of the fairies, indeed!
_ The nicotiana comes easily enough, for once
planted, it seeds itself into the ground, to offer
next spring any quantity of young plants. |

The tall and stately perennial delphiniums
were a point of garden interest through June and
until mid-July, as they dominated the “blue
bed.” I wish I had more of them! I had; about a
thousand seedlings from selected flowers formed a
moonlight meal for several predaceous snails one
season, and I have lost a season since. By the
way, I have cut off the spent stems, right to the
ground, in the main delphinium bed, added some
encouraging sheep-manure and bone dust, and in
consequence can almost see the new stems grow.

Hardy phlox is not yet right in my garden. It
blooms, but not so prosperously as it ought to. I
have expectations and hopes! But I do have,
even in July, the first scarlet plumes of Salvia
splendens, and the rich blue blooms of its sister
S. patens. They serve to carry along the bloom
time in a month not very floriferous, because the
sun is too ardent. July is midsummer, and the
leaf greens are now in full and fine maturity.

CHAPTER VIN—AUGUST
SOBER SUMMER

HE foliage of summer is generally mature,
green, sober. There is a certain warmth
and gaiety about the leaf progress of June

and early July, and a vast variety in shades, as
well, so that any body of trees and shrubs of vary-
ing kinds will display anything from the youngest
light yellow leaves of the Norway maples to the
deep, even green of the horse-chestnuts. Toward
the first of August the leaves are quite or nearly
full-grown, and they have settled down to their
real work of elaborating food for the trees that
bear them.

My water-color friend, Little, finds in this color
maturity another confirmation of his theory that
there is a sort of color compensation, a chromatic
balance, of the seasons. In spring, the air and the
ground are cool, though slowly absorbing heat, and
the leaves and flowers are warm in hue—there
are the really hot colors of the tulips, the yellows of
some tree blossoms, and so on. As the season
warms, the foliage and flower hues become in

(123)

124 MY GROWING GARDEN

general cooler, until in summer we have the deep
green of mature leaves, the deep blue of the white-
dotted sky, and the blues and whites of the garden.
When cooler nights begin to come, the summer
foliage is likely to assume hints of brown, the corn
takes on the colors of maturity, and we have the
decidedly warm-hued chrysanthemums, purple
asters and the like to compensate. The sharp
weather of winter demands all possible heat from
nature’s color scheme, and we have it in the
browned leaf following the brilliant hues of
autumn, in the corn shock and the bare tree
stem, and even in the shadows on the snow.

Such is the theory, and it seems logical to me,
though I have heard it derided, not at all to my
discomfort—unless in August, the month when
sense as well as theory demands coolness in lan-
guage, in the breakfast melon, and anywhere else
we can get it.

This theory takes no account of abnormal
colors in foliage. That unwholesome-looking shrub,
the golden-leaved elder, and the other jaundice-
foliaged abnormalities, are not included, because
they are not natural. To me these yellow-leaved
affairs are repellant, because they look as if the
plant lacked blood, and was unable to get enough
chlorophyl pumped up from its roots to make a

SOBER SUMMER 125

decent showing. Why advertise such an apparent
deficiency?

Nor have I fallen in love with the Burbank
“Rainbow” corn, with its streaks of red and white
and pink, for it adds no color note of value, and
has no special beauty of form. If one tries out
garden freaks by William Morris’s prescription,
the case of the corn will be quite easily settled.
Morris said, “Have nothing about you that you do
not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
There is certainly no use in this rainbow stuff, and
it is not beautiful to my eyes; therefore it will not
be in the garden again.

The expensive Colorado blue spruce is another
of these over-loud growths that needs at least to
be used with great care. I have seen it in its
native Rocky Mountain habitat, along river
slopes, where it was the exclamation point in a
mass of the deep green Engelmann spruce, and
there it was very beautiful. I have also seen it in
well-considered and rather extensive evergreen
plantings in the east, used also as a color point, for
emphasis and shading, and again it was beautiful.
But planted as it frequently is, as the chief feature
of a lawn, standing out alone and away from other
evergreens, it advertises only the desire of the
gardener to show that he is willing to wear a red

126 MY GROWING GARDEN

necktie with a dress suit! Anyway, a far more
soft and pleasing note of color variation in ever-
green foliage is given by the lovely Concolor fir,
or by the blue form of the Douglas fir, both of
which are of a distinctly attractive form.

In August I am but an occasional visitor at
Breeze Hill. Long settled habit takes us all to
the cottage at Eagles Mere, nestled into the edge
of the primeval forest, and not far from a lake
that cools, charms and holds us. It is my yearly
opportunity to renew acquaintance with the won-
drous flora of the forest floor, to live among the
trees that were old when Columbus discovered
America, to see how God’s garden works out with
all time and all nature at command. I have
traveled to many forests, east, west, south, never
to find one so richly attractive as this in the
Pennsylvania Alleghanies, a half-mile high, and
with its marvelous laurels and rhododendrons, its
great huckleberries and viburnums, its giant hem-
locks and maples and birches. The “going” in
the trackless depths at Eagles Mere is as toilsome
and adventurous as any I have ever found, and
far more interesting and strenuous than the
traversing of the Rockies or the Sierras. Here, free
from regular duties, with a wondrous night canopy,
I am awakened in the morning by the hermit

SOBER SUMMER 127

thrush, and all day—until the later days of the
month—may hear the songs of many birds.

But I cannot wholly abandon my growing gar-
den. At least twice during the month I return to
enjoy the change, to revel in the delicious and
uncanned fruit of the vegetable-garden, and to
keep “‘tab’’ on the place generally. As I have
previously written, the garden is planned to
reserve its best until we are again home, in Sep-
tember; yet Nature is so kind to the growing
garden that August is a bloom month as well as a
fruit month and a vegetable month. &

One August there had been a week or more of
unusually cool and wet weather, which resulted in
finding the roses enjoying new vigor, when I came
home on the eleventh day of the month. Hot,
dry weather does not prove congenial to the queen
of flowers, and August is usually of that sort.
The hateful “black spot’’ has removed most of the
leaves, in several such seasons, and mildew is also
destroyingly in evidence. Spraying does not get
so well done in this gardenerless garden when the
“boss” is away, and it is difficult indeed to keep
the roses, particularly the hybrid teas, healthy
and growing. At such seasons I envy England’s
rose climate of cool nights and continual moisture.

Another year, the first August visit showed me

128 MY GROWING GARDEN

the success of a scheme to compete with the hun-
gry, thirsty, energetic roots of the Norway maple
that marks and dominates the western border of
the “formal” garden. This big maple shades most
satisfactorily a place where visitors may sit in
comfort to look over the garden. (Visitors only;
the “boss” has never time to sit in comfort in
this garden!) I had tried all sorts of things that
might be expected to grow under this tree, but
none of them did it. Finally I paved the central
area with irregular brown-stone flags, laid with
wide joints to admit water. This solved the prob-
lem as far as it went, but those same fibrous roots
kept reaching out for water and fertility beyond on
the two sides not bounded by a stone wall. It
occurred to me that I might succeed with the
scarlet sage, backed up by African marigolds;
wherefore in June the larger bed to the east was
transplanted full of these. The return in mid-
August showed that the Salvia “Bonfire” was
kindling, and although the plants leaned well
toward the sun, they, and the marigolds back of
them, grew and blossomed most beautifully and
most brilliantly until frost.

The other angle within the root influence gave
opportunity to try an experiment in the survival
of the strongest. There was reason on this south

PLaTE XXV. “The China asters . . . especially the King sorts
that reign over the border along the axis walk.”’ (See page 152.)

SOBER SUMMER 129

side for a low screen from the central walk, and I
planted the fearfully persistent Bocconia cordata,
or plume poppy, next the flagstone pavement,
with the scarcely less persistent Shasta daisies
next, edging the combination with petunias, them-
selves usually quite able to hold their own. “Let
them fight it out among themselves,” I said to
my son, as we finished the planting.

Now I find they seem to have arranged a sort
of entente cordiale, for all three families are dwelling
together in apparent content and in considerable
beauty. The bocconia shows its attractive plumes
and its no less attractive fig-like leaves in com-
fortable height, the Shasta daisy has bloomed
abundantly, and the petunias are rich in fringed
flowers. True, the yellow roots of the bocconia
have appeared outside the stone wall, and must
be ruthlessly chopped out if I hope to confine this
energetic plant to its designated place, but this is
not much bother. It is a good part of the fun of
growing a garden to try out plants here and there,
to pit one against another sometimes, and thus to
work toward being master of the garden.

The so-called “‘China”’ asters, which are botani-
cally not asters, but callistephus, are August and
September bloomers at Breeze Hill, and each year
we “do” them better, as the professional gardener

130 MY GROWING GARDEN

puts it. With their colors in all the cyanic range
of pink, purple, crimson and white; with their
forms of flatness or roundness, of regularity or
informality, of singleness or doubleness; with their
accommodating disposition as to transplanting,
soil and blooming, it would be difficult to name
any more desirable annual. Last year it was the
“King” varieties that pleased us most, but all
were good to see, good to have and good to give
away. The seed was sown in mid-March, in the
neighbor’s greenhouse, and the little seedlings
transplanted twice. My son is rather an aster
crank; and he seems to think that the half-trowelful
of wood-ashes he digs into the ground around each
plant when the asters are put where they are to
bloom is of real value. |

There is a nasty, agile and persistent bug that
bothers the China aster. If and when he comes,
war must be declared at once, with no parleying
and no diplomatic hedging or “watchful waiting.”
A can with an inch of kerosene in it; a careful,
quick shake of the plant so that the shiny black
little devil drops headlong into it—and he is dead.
Early in the morning is best for the funeral, because
the corpse-elect is less gymnastic before the sun is
high. But any time will do for the massacre, and
every time is best until all are dead. It is a per-

SOBER SUMMER 131

fectly simple proposition; either you kill all these
“aster beetles,” or the beetles eat out and destroy
all your asters. No spraying, no powdering, no
anything but a petroleum bath!

I had been puzzled to know why the tiger
lilies that seemed so well pleased for two years, in
the long border along the axis walk, are now
quietly getting away. It is a habit lilies have, I
know; but I thought this variety, which I have
seen in great beds, apparently decades old, would
stay with me. The situation was seemingly just
right, but “Chinese’”’ Wilson’s fine treatise on the
lily family, which I have just read, convinces me
even more fully of my ignorance. The bloom this
August is scanty and weak, and the apparent
reason is that I have the bulbs in a really damp
place, whereas Mr. Wilson insists that they must
have ample drainage. It is a matter of moving
again.

Other lilies there ought to be in this garden;
but there’s a pocket-book reason! Some time the
stately auratum, the nodding canadense, the fine
lancifolium sorts will come into the borders, I
hope, and to stay. I am the more anxious since [
learn—again of Wilson—that they will thrive in my
home-made leaf-mold. But I ought not to forget
Lilium Henryi which has located, seemingly, and

132 MY GROWING GARDEN

which each year gives us a cluster of rich orange
blooms with a notable green stripe.

Not far from where the tiger lilies are passing
away are, or were, some plants that I found I could
spare with pleasure, but which had no intention of
leaving me, it seems. I planted the much-adver-
tised and catalogue-lauded Anchusa ttalica, “Drop-
more variety,” in a prominent place in the bed
intended to be confined primarily to blue flowers,
and in which my delphiniums have been for several
years giving me increasingly splendid bloom ser-
vice. The anchusa, raised from seed, grew easily,
and lustily, and pervadingly; and it bloomed, too.
Instead of the “gentian-blue flowers that make it
one of the most desirable of all perennials,” accord-
ing to the catalogue, there came fusty little pink
and blue blobs on the end of a coarse, hairy stem,
arising out of leaves that were not nearly so attrac-
tive as those of a burdock! And the thing crowded
my lavender, insulted a perfectly good platycodon,
and slopped over on some plants of the really
pleasing stokesia. By September, one plant rotted
at its heart, disgustingly, and I dug it out, as well
as its fellows, concluding that would be about all
from Mr. Dropmore Anchusa. But next year it
came along just the same, each bit of root left
in the ground evidently having the adventitious

Puare XXVI. The formal garden in August. (See page 128.)

SOBER SUMMER 133

bud necessary to set up for itself. The next digging-
out was as thorough as that required for achillea,
or bocconia, or physalis. I put the plants in a
broad border where they seem to be in better
place, and where they do fair service.

It would be hard to find a garden plant more
generally pleasing than the hardy perennial del-
phinium. Rich ground—really rich; plenty of
water; an annual fall covering of the crowns with
sifted coal-ashes to ward off some bugs Mrs. Ely
tells about; and the result is bloom from June until
frost, and after frost. When I did not cut the
bloom heads before seed formed, and indeed cut
down the plant to the ground after the first burst
of bloom, I had just ordinary blooming; but now
that I keep cutting, there is continual flowering.
And such flowering! Great long heads of sky-blue,
of ultramarine, of deeper blue, held up in a most
attractive fashion over good foliage; what more
could be asked? The first growth in the spring is
very strong, and the plant must be kept tied to
supports. Later, these may be withdrawn.

In this same blue bed, later August sees the
opening of Conoclinium celestinum, a perennial not
well known. It is in Bailey’s big Cyclopedia now
classed as a eupatorium, in the boneset family of
fine wild things; but it came to me as conoclinium,

134 MY GROWING GARDEN

and it is more blue for a longer time than any other
plant I know. Its paint-brushy heads look like
the familiar tender annual, the ageratum, and I
have had them grow together to advantage. For
all of six weeks the taller spikes of the conoclinium
make intense the blue corner where they are.

Another blue satisfaction is blooming along this
month—the so-called “blue spirea,”’ which is no
more a spirea than it is a potato. Its first proper
name of Caryopteris Mastacanthus has held it for a
long time from the popularity it deserves. Perhaps
the new Bailey name of C. incana will help! In
my growing garden it fits into a picture from the
south porch, and provides for many weeks a blue
mist of graceful details, about two-and-a-half feet
high. Either fall sun or partial shade suits it.

I have another catalogue humbug to report
upon for August. Because of its mountain asso-
ciation and its own beauty of color and pleasant
odor, I have long liked the bergamot, or monarda
—or horse-mint, as its unfair common name calls
it. The fine fringy scarlet flowers come along in
early summer, and at once remind me of the
mountain climb to Eagles Mere, with the narrow-
gauge railroad winding through great clumps of this
brilliant bloomer. When I read in several cata-
logues that the select variety “Cambridge Scarlet”

SOBER SUMMER 135

had “flowers of a much more brilliant shade than
the old variety,” I was impressed, and bought.
But the plants produced only blooms—and quan-
tities of them, too—of a dirty dull crimson, not at
all comparable with the plain M. didyma I was
accustomed to. With a recommendation to the
nurseryman to take treatment for color blindness
I have “passed up” the Cambridge fraud.

Of this same nurseryman I obtained two plants
entirely pleasing. Spirea Filipendula fl.-pl. is the
portentous name he gave the one that has rather
dainty leaves, close to the ground, from amid which
arise spikes about eighteen inches high of handsome
white flowers, just now about over. It ought to be
used as an edging plant, and it is called “drop-
wort” sometimes as a common name, while Bailey’s
Cyclopedia now sets it forth as Filipendula hexa-
petala, poor thing! The other good thing is
Artemisia lactiflora, which grows some three feet
high, and has also pieasing white flowers that stay
good through weeks of hot weather. Unfortu-
nately, in my state of misinformation, I planted
these two together—but they don’t fit!

It is much pleasanter to record satisfaction
than failure, wherefore I now tell of how more
than completely all catalogue representations have
been realized concerning two shrubs, not so well

136 MY GROWING GARDEN

known as they ought to be in this land of perva-
ding “Golden Glow” and hydrangea “p. g.,’’ as the
nurserymen abbreviate it. Abelia grandiflora,
sometimes A. rupestris, is a graceful shrub with
small, glossy leaves, almost evergreen in the South,
and holding until long after the first frosts in this
climate. If it had never a flower, it would be
better than privet, for instance; but it does have
flowers, and lovely they are. In refinement and
form they resemble the trailing arbutus, or May-
flower; but unlike that shy and evanescent favorite,
these persist for most of the time from June to late
September. Their persistent dark red calyces are
in themselves ornamental, without the dainty
flower, and the whole combination is good. A
fairly open and sunny place seems to best suit
this abelia, which has not yet accumulated any
“common” names. In some locations it may freeze
to the ground in a very severe winter. This is
nothing to worry about, for the young shoots will
soon make a fine symmetrical bush, blooming
freely the same season.

The other shrub is called “summer heliotrope,”
“butterfly bush,” and any other common name
that happens to occur to the owner or the nursery-
man. Its real name is buddleia, which is bad
enough as far as it goes, with the worst yet to

SOBER SUMMER. 137

come, for the specific name of the best of the
varieties hardy in the middle states is Davidii
var. magnifica. Get it all: Buddleta Davidii var.
magnifica! What would have happened to the
lilac if it had had to be named after Adam Buddle,
an English botanist? It is mighty hard on a good
plant to have so much mixed-up alphabet hung
to it, and many such suffer under a blanket of
obscurity for no worse cause. :

But this buddlea—I am omitting an unneces-
sary vowel to try to make a name at least partly
common—is a very excellent shrub. To be sure,
zero weather will probably freeze it down to the
ground or to the protection on the ground, and
thus make sure of the pruning it needs; for its
vigorous roots will provide shoots that will in a
hurry make plenty of bush for beginning to bloom
in late July or early August, and once begun, it
seems to have no particular idea of stopping for a
matter of five or six weeks. These blooms are in
long panicles of rosy purple, enough lke a helio-
trope to mark the resemblance, and they stand
thickly upon the plant, which under generous
treatment tends to become rather coarse. The
butterfly designation is not inapt, because the
butterflies seem exceedingly fond of the shrub,
and are about it constantly.

138 MY GROWING GARDEN

Those who want to obtain this buddlea will
find it offered by nurserymen as B. variabilis
magnifica. It likes the sun also, and planted close
to tall shrubs, or at the edge of a border where it
has room to spread, it is a fine thing in its season,
in which there are none too many plants blooming.
I am particular about room for it; a diameter of
six feet the second year is not unusual. In fact, I
planted one according to the size of its roots, and
by midsummer it had, as I have previously noted,
completely covered from sight two abelias, about
three feet away!

The perennial gaillardias do much fon the
August flower show, for they keep up the blooming
begun many weeks ago, and they are bright and
showy in their brilliance of red and yellow. To
freely cut the flowers, which last well in water, is
to assure more and more of them. As a contrast
in August, consider the sweet white “day lily,”
called Funkia subcordata in the catalogues. Its
fine clusters are most lasting in partial shade.

Amongst annual flowers there are several that
enjoy August. It is in the heat of this month
that the lowly portulaca flourishes, for no matter
what one may do, the ground must be hot before
it will germinate, grow and bloom. It revels in the
full sun, and as I used it one season at Breeze

SOBER SUMMER 139

Hill, it made a riot of bright hues along both
sides of a flagstone center walk. Indeed, it rioted
too much, actually covering the stone footway
so that one had to step on its flowers or go off
the walk. I had to cut it back vigorously, which
seemed cruel while I was doing it.

Most garden-makers know the old-fashioned
zinnia, common-named “youth and old age”
for some abstruse reason, but few know the newer
giant form, and the old and overlooked Haageana
varieties. ‘The flower is really a giant among
zinnias, and what is more, its size has not brought
coarseness, but rather the contrary. After one
trial, I sowed only the scarlet and the yellow
giants, from which there was plenty of color varia-
tion, with a slight predominance of a strong yellow
and a gloriously bright scarlet, both with flowers
emulating the dahlia in form, and maintained on
long and stiff stems well above the abundant foli-
age. For cutting and for bold garden effects, this
zinnia is a fine thing, I find, and the flowers last
very long in perfection. Contrary to a tradition
handed down to me, it not only endures but revels
in good ground and plenty of manure, and it can
also use plenty of water.

The other zinnia, Haageana by definite name,
has quite small flowers, from the size of a quarter-

140 MY GROWING GARDEN

dollar up to about forty cents’ worth. It is a sort
of glorified coreopsis, but is not so weedy or so
sticky as that annual. The colors seem to run into
rich markings of orange, red, yellow, cream, and in
between, and as the plants make fine little bushes
and keep long in bloom, I’m voting for the zinnia
with the name of the great Erfurt seedsman
attached to it. |

These August evenings are made fragrant by the
same sweet tobacco, or nicotiana, which began its
odorous bloom in early July. There are really
beautiful ten-weeks stocks to add their sweetness,
also; and the long twilight is altogether lovely in
the garden, if only I can persuade myself to put
away the weeder or the shears, letting the 7
morrow look out for itself!

On an August return—the second trip home—I
looked after the summer pruning of the dwarf
fruit trees. They have grown tremendously, and
the peach trees this season gave us a fine crop, as
also did the plums. I have learned from my Ger-
man gardener-mentor, Mr. Rebe, to cut off at least
half those long growths on the apples and pears, and
as well to reduce the cherries and plums. He has
taught me to select the limbs to leave, and to cut
near the bud from which I want the next shoot to
arise. The theory of summer pruning I know; it is

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SOBER SUMMER 141

that the shock of heavy cutting is likely to cause
the tree to set fruit buds the sooner. At first it is
hard to realize that next year’s blossoms and
potential fruits are being made this summer.

As thus noted, my dwarf fruit trees have
grown more than generously, so that I know there
is plenty of plant-food in this seemingly sterile
shade. Bearing has not as yet been full or normal
on the apples and pears, because the trees are too
busy forming themselves into symmetrical shape.
This year I have pruned toward a more open cen-
ter, to let the light into the heart of the tree’s
bushy top.

One season the peaches on a Carman tree came
along as watery clingstones, rather than as the
richly flavored freestones the same tree had pro-
duced before. A wet season had much to do with
the change, and it is possible that my neglect of
summer spraying at various periods had some-
thing to do with this trouble, and with the rot
that destroyed many of the fruits.

One of the pear trees flattened out against
the espalier has had on it for two succeeding
years some beautiful fruits. To show what has
happened in four years, or more accurately just
fifty months, I have made a photograph of the
espalier in May of the year of its planting, and for

142 MY GROWING GARDEN

contrast have also introduced another of the whole
orchard, to indicate how these dwarfs have found
prosperity in this rough red shale. Some growth,
isn’t it?

While I am writing of pictures, let me refer the
reader to Plate X XI, so that I may ask whether
the sight of orderly rows of growing vegetables is
anything else than pleasant? Celery coming fast,
beets and beans in abundance; carrots that are
creamy before cooking, kohlrabi that is a surprise;
experimental plantings of okra that I don’t know
how to use and of big Chinese radishes that I don’t
want to use; salsify for next winter’s and chicory
for next spring’s salad; tomatoes that are all tender
flesh and limas that are “all to the good;’—doesn’t
that sound as well as it looks—and tastes?

And then the fruits; there are some peaches yet,
some plums, and the Green Mountain grapes have
ripened, as usual, by the time of my second trip
home. Indeed I am enjoying this growing garden,
and some others with me!

CHAPTER IX—SEPTEMBER
GOOD THINGS TO EAT—FINE THINGS TO SEE
. a garden month, September carries a note

of completeness. There is some relaxation

now from the planning and the planting,
and especially from the weeding and the spraying
of earlier months. The results of hard work
become apparent, and there are actually hours
when I may sit at ease in the swing under the
maple, contemplating the growth of the garden,
and thinking more of next year’s plans than of the
next hour’s work.

The month is usually well started before Eagles
Mere releases us, and so we find at Breeze Hill
actual September, rather than the August exten-
sion that one may expect in the earlier days. Of
course the very first thing on returning to this
regretfully left growing-garden home is a trip
about, to see what is doing. Often this is a twilight
trip, and it has been taken by moonlight to no
disadvantage. Any light or no light, I could not
expect to sleep without greeting the garden!

This year the arranged vegetable succession has

(143)

144 MY GROWING GARDEN

been well maintained, and a rich abundance is
found of good things to eat—things to eat the par-
taking of which means no shedding of blood, no
cessation of sentient life. At once, and without any
particular thought about it, we become mostly
vegetarian in our diet. Why not, with such sweet
corn as awaits us, the product of our own land?
The sort we find ready now is Goldenrod, of
most delicious flavor and notable sweetness, which
bears more and larger ears than the earlier favorite
Golden Bantam. We have it boiled, an hour
from the growing stalks; or we have, in lieu of a
roast, a great corn pie, or “pasty,” that makes
meats a mere unimportant recollection.

Little beets, meltingly tender; yellow-podded
snap beans, causing gratitude that they came on
the table without the aid of a can-opener; spinach
that has the flavor only possible in freshly plucked
spinach; tomatoes that slice into small steaks of
delicate flesh, with very little of seed cavity;
carrots that hardly need to be creamed at all; and
lima beans of the right size, fresh, and enough of
them to satisfy a certain garden-maker who thinks
he could about live on such beans and suitable
bread—and all these available so as to give us our
two vegetables for each dinner in a succession that
prevents monotony.

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 145

Those same tomatoes, and some of the Cos
lettuce, come in comfortably for luncheon; while
at breakfast one may always have radishes of some
sort. There are growing this year big plants of
the Japanese Sakurajima radish, with tremendous
roots that slice into a most inoffensive table result,
the pungency being wholly out of relation to the
size.

Our family has never connected very satis-
factorily with Swiss chard, of which I usually grow
some plants. If we had not such excellent beets
and such delightful spinach, we might become
enthusiastic about this vegetable which is a sort
of combination of both.

I find the garden well tilled, and thus with-
standing the better the absence of rain, which
showed in browned fields on my way home. Later,
we shall have to water, unless nature takes that
essential work off our hands. The result of several
years of war on weeds is now seen in some relaxa-
tion of their abundant germination. My effort
has been to kill the weed before it has grown its
second pair of leaves, not only in the interest of a
clean place, but because I have seen what constant
and persistent stirring of the ground does. I sus-
pect that the necessity for weeding, in order that
the first gardeners might restrict the use of the

146 MY GROWING GARDEN

ground to certain plants they considered not weeds,
was the beginning of culture. From Dr. Bailey’s
angle of view, the Colorado potato beetle, the
San José scale, and all weeds, are blessings in dis-
guise, because they force upon lazy humanity
action which has other results than those imme-
diately aimed at. To the average slouchy “‘hired-
man,” the demand for the “dust mulch” of proper
cultivation seems unreasonable and absurd, as I
know from more than one experience.

At first I had no trouble in having plenty of
inducement to cultivate, for in this old garden,
neglected for more than a dozen years before I
tackled it, there were vast reserves of weed seeds
to keep germinating. After my ruthless slaughter
had begun to make an impression on the shepherd’s
purse, the docks, the “pusly,” the button-weed,
and the other fifty-seven varieties of plants out of
place, I had to contend with the contributions of
the wind, which blew over nearby neglected pas-
tures, thickly overgrown with wild carrot, many
asters, goldenrods and the like. Now the opening
of streets, the partial building up of the neighbor-
hood, and most of all, two years of intensive cul-
ture of the worst nearby weed patch as a boys’
garden, has reduced the wind contributions materi-
ally. It is no longer difficult to keep weeds out,

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 147

especially since I have replaced certain of them
with scarcely less persistent plants that I prefer—
as I shall tell in a later chapter.

September finds us enjoying fruits, as well as
vegetables, in this growing garden. Two old Buf-
fum pear trees, only survivals of a really great
pear orchard that once vied with the Bellevue
grapes, have taken on new life since they were
cleaned, trimmed of dead wood, and sprayed.
Each year they produce many bushels of fruit
which we considered of little use until I remem-
bered what I ought not to have forgotten—that
most pears must be ripened off the tree to develop
their proper flavor. Since then we prize the
Bufium trees. Of the dwarf orchard, the peach
trees have been bearing, as I have previously
written, and the variety Stump the World is
good in the earlier part of September, while a later
sort—Krummell October—is not near ripening.

The only apple trees to bear are the Bismarck,
and they began the next year after planting. This
year one tree, certainly not more than seven feet
tall, had on it twenty-three apples, and large
apples they grew to be. I am not at all proud of
them, for the simple reason that they are more
ornamental than useful. I am known as a con-
firmed apple-eater, but the Bismarck is quite safe

148 MY GROWING GARDEN

from my appetite, being one of those Ben Davisy
kind of fruit swindles that has only some fine
red and yellow stripes on a thick and glossy skin
to commend it, the inside averaging somewhat less
toothsome than a turnip. These Bismarck trees
are going to be “top-worked” to varieties fit to
eat, for I am not growing a garden on any false-
alarm basis, and fruits that are only good-looking
must move out.

The grapes—oh, that’s another story! Breeze
Hill has been growing grapes, the records seem to
show, since 1819, and most certainly since 1836.
As a boy I knew the product of the “Bellevue
Grapery,” covering the hillsides south of the house
in which I now write, and know it to be superior.
Such Concords and Delawares as the proud master
of this vineyard used to market I have never seen
elsewhere. When I came here six years ago the old
vines, planted in 1858, were yet on the land, but in
great disorder. No trimming for years; trellises
broken down; the rows unfertilized and unculti-
vated, and the poor old vines exposed to vandals
of the type of some who came after we had settled
here, and who resented being stopped from break-
ing off great branches of the old lilacs, saying,
“Why, we always come here for laylocks!”

I was told that the vines were hopelessly

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 149

afflicted with root-knot and other diseases, and at
any rate the hillsides near were being cleared of
them for real-estate development purposes. Most
of those on my two acres were torn out, but I
reserved two rows to experiment with. The first
fall Old William got rid of most of these by way of
a trash-fire that escaped him, and there were left
but twelve of the venerable vines. These I worked
over, trimming, spraying, cleaning, fertilizing,
tying-up; and they are now the determining points
in my two-row vineyard. All but two were Con-
cord, and the one Delaware gave up the ghost the
first winter. To complete the rows, I planted
fine three-year-old vines from Fredonia, of such
sorts as I wanted. They have flourished and fruited,
so that this year I have enjoyed splendid Concord
grapes from vines side by side, the one fifty-six years
planted, and the other four years planted—and no
one could tell the fruit apart! On some of the vet-
erans the rugged stems are three to four inches
through above the ground; yet they do their
appointed work quite as well as their youthful
associates.

As I have before mentioned, the best of the
bunches on the grape-vines are given the pro-
tection of a paper bag, applied in July, in which
they come to a more perfect and unscarred matu-

150 MY GROWING GARDEN

rity. These grapes have been unexpectedly free
from insect and fungous troubles, the worst of
either being the visit, one year, of an agile and
determined _ steel-blue beetle—determined to
utterly destroy. He was immune to sprays, but
when I made a submarine of him by shaking him
into kerosene, he gave up.

The chief fruit event of the month, however, is
the strawberry event. “Strawberries in Septem-
ber—you're joking!’ someone remarks. Not just
exactly; those deliciously flavored, deep red _ ber-
ries I had for breakfast the morning after the
arrival from Eagles Mere were no joke! Nor was
the strawberry shortcake two days later a joke—
it was a culinary poem! I have been hinting in
earlier chapters at a strawberry story. Here it
is, for the strawberries are now ripe, and I can
pick and eat as the reader envies me—unless he
calls and participates, or by happy chance has
opportunity to pick and eat from his own “‘fall-
bearing”’ plants.

I had heard of fall-bearing ction bene and
several years ago had bought certain loudly
commended foreign sorts—the “French Four-
Seasons,” and others. The Frenchman did pro-
duce some weedy little fruits, red enough, but of
no importance as strawberries; and the other sorts

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 151

just failed to connect at all. A strawberry-grower
sent me samples of berries one autumn, but they
tasted more of the cotton they were packed in
than like the red fruit I knew. Early this spring
I visited a strawberry-grower in Maryland, my
friend Allen, who has actually millions of plants
in his level fields. He showed me his Progressive
variety, which, he asserted, was a real strawberry
that would bear fruit in the fall, and was worth
while. I know he knows, and I took his word
against my skepticism. The one hundred try-
out plants came and were set on April twenty-
seventh, quite late for my location. They were
well cared for, and as per instructions, the earlier
blossoms—and some plants were in bloom by May
twentieth!—were picked off. About the first of
August, on a trip home, I found a new setting of
blossoms; and these were not disturbed; but the
plants were carefully mulched, and several times
watered during the bitter drought that followed.
The lovely, sweet and high-flavored fruit I am now
enjoying is the result; and as blossoms and green
fruits are crowding the ripening berries, I expect
there will be strawberries for some weeks.

The difference between these September Pro-
gressives and the usual crop in June is that all of
these are sweet and high-flavored, while some of

152 MY GROWING GARDEN

the June berries are not. I am converted; and
I'll hope to have more of these delightful fruits
another year. Seemingly, as the ripening is suc-
cessive, and not in one burst of a crop, it will take
more plants to keep the family properly straw-
berried in September and later; but that is easy
enough!

Certainly the growing garden has given us
good things to eat this month. It has, as well,
many good things to see. The China asters are yet
superb, especially the King sorts that reign over
the border along the axis walk dividing the vege-
table-garden. We cut, and cut, and cut again;
always there are plenty of great flowers yet
remaining. The “blister beetle’ is now but a
petroleum memory, for we literally “‘soaked him”
in time.

The hardy and actual asters are also fine. I
find it necessary to be rather cruel to these, for
they spread so rapidly that they tend to overrun
other equally important flowers; wherefore I
annually dig out and dispose of any that are in the
way; as they are then weeds in the proper sense.

The boltonias are akin to the hardy asters, and
as likely to be too pervasive. But the pink sort in
bloom is lovely, for it seems at a little distance to
be covered with a rosy mist. Growing about as

Puate XXVIII. “The ‘white snakeroot’ . . . the absurd common
name to Eupatorium ageratoides.’’ (See page 153.)

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 153

high is the “white snakeroot,” to give the absurd
common name to Eupatorium ageratoides. ‘The
latter proper name is descriptive, for it is an
ageratum-like “boneset” of most pleasing char-
acter, and here remains in bloom for all of three
weeks in the full sun. I brought the plants from
the wild, and Mr. Manning was afraid they would
not endure the soil and the sunshine. They have
“rejoiced and been glad”’ for both.

Along the axis or living-room border—did I
mention that Mr. Manning had me center the
garden on the house?—there is now blooming a
lowly blue beauty, Plumbago Larpente as it used to
be called, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides as it is now
abusively designated in Bailey’s Standard Cyclo-
pedia, and leadwort as sometimes known. Poor
little creeping bit of blue elegance—how can it
get loved under such a bunch of riotous Latin
profanity! I can make it a go at plumbago, and
it reproduces now in this shady place the hue of
the scilla of spring. Near it grows, and tends to
overgrow everything, the pink-flowered Sedum
spectabile, which is handsome and happy here
where the sun visits scantily.

The splendid delphiniums keep right on during
the month in their blue prominence, and my pet
weedy tobacco annual, the nicotiana, is as sweet

154 MY GROWING GARDEN

and easy as ever. That dry place near the maple
tree is ablaze with Scarlet Dragon salvia, and the
conoclinium continues its mist of blue. In another
of the garden beds—and I wish they were all
borders !—the pleasing salpiglossis holds up its odd
flowers in much richness. Some lantanas nearby
are now a mass of orange and yellow flowers, and
the source of a strong and not disagreeable odor.
Another catalogue disappointment is now in bloom
in Helenrum autumnale rubrum. Note that last
Latin word, which means red, and which is why I
bought the plants. With a magnifying glass, at
times, it is possible to note a bit of scarlet in the
mass of “‘sneezewort” blooms now open, but
generally they are just plain orange, and nothing
more. I was almost enough provoked at the fraud
to “‘see red,” but that wouldn’t improve the hue
of the flowers. |

The snapdragons are now in their glory, and I
think they’ll keep it up until after the first frosts,
if we pick them often enough. Clear white, and a
lovely shade of pink, are my favorites, though some
deep scarlet blooms are pretty fine. I’m sticking
to the dwarf or Tom Thumb and intermediate
classes, as the tall forms tend to blow over in the
winds that sweep this garden.

Seedsmen are generally careful, but I’ve been

GOOD THINGS TO EAT 155

wondering just what particular reason the guilty
one is going to give me to account for the fact
that most of the seed he sold me to plant as mixed
Phlox Drummondii has produced plain pink
petunias? The petunias are not bad, but I wanted
phlox, and there are some among the petunias,
though not in predominance.

Speaking of the petunia, what a satisfactory
annual it is! When the little seedlings first appear,
so tiny and so weak, it is hard to believe that in
but a few weeks we shall be enjoying a veritable
cloud of bloom, if it happens to be a one-color
planting like this corner of lovely Snowstorm.
Equally lovely are the bloom-covered plants of a
dwarf petunia from Sutton, which keeps within six
inches of the ground, blooming continually in pink-
and-white clouds. Yet another petunia from the
English seedsman is called violet on the seed-
packet, but its large and numerous flowers are the
exact purple shade of the much-desired Clematis
Jackmani. From the same very careful Sutton I
have had and tried to succeed with nemesia, an
English favorite which quite evidently does not
find pleasure in the Breeze Hill conditions, for it ~
barely exists.

Other annuals add to the mature beauty of the
September garden. The only shrubs yet blooming

156 MY GROWING GARDEN

are the abelia and the buddlea, and my one
unprized plant of Hydrangea paniculata grandi-
flora. Another year the fine H. paniculata, not
grandiflora, will be strong enough to bloom, and
then I shall have a favorite close by, in its interest-
ing and not fussy flowers.

This month the giant zinnias are really gor-
geous, impressive, fine! The crescent border which
in spring showed in narcissi against the great
evergreens now glows with their stately flowers in
clear and bright reds and yellows. These blooms
are not coarse, either in form or in color, and when
cut for house decoration they supply a certain
arrangement-possibility peculiar to themselves and
entirely desirable.

The Haageana zinnias, to which I have pre-
viously referred in terms of commendation, show
clearly on another curve, where they are bloom-
ing away as if they intended never to stop.

Yes, we’ve had, and have, plenty of good things
to eat from the garden-home, and all the time there
is even more of a feast for the eye. God is very
good to the gardener!

PLATE XXIX. “The giant zinnias are really gorgeous. .
rescent border . . . glows with their stately flowers.’

(See page 156.)

CHAPTER X—OCTOBER
THE EARLY FALL GLORY
F SEPTEMBER shows as its distinguishing

feature garden maturity, October may be

said, in this climate at least, to put a plus mark
on the same feature. All the things you have been
doing come to some result by October, and the
hint of the coming winter rest-time for the vege-
table kingdom only hastens the rush to grow, it
seems. When I look back over the records of past
Octobers, and then look around me at the record,
on and in the ground, of this October, I am con-
strained to call it a very full month, and a very
pleasing one.

The lawns have recovered from the paralysis
of summer’s heat, so deadening to the grass on
this yet thin soil at Breeze Hill, and the green is
rich and deep. Cool nights have caused the roses
to rejoice, and not only all the steady bloomers
like Teplitz (that’s my name for Gruss an Teplitz,
a scandalous load for a great little rose!), Orleans
and Baby Rambler are exerting themselves, but
Killarney and the hybrid teas are at work making

(157)

158 MY GROWING GARDEN

big buds, and the great white queen, Druschki (my
convenient contraction for Frau Karl Druschki), is
showing superb flowers. Even the General Jacq.
gives us once in a while a crimson surprise.

Shrubs that did their blooming early have put
in the summer making growth for next year, and
now they show it in stem and foliage. I ought to
trim off the greened heads of the so-called “Snow-
ball” hydrangea, but I rather like to see them, and
I altogether like the great oak-leaves of Hydrangea
quercifolla, a shrub not yet big enough to bloom
much, but most distinct in its leafage. I have
associated all the rarer hydrangeas in one vicinity,
each as points in one of the vista-pictures I am
working for and gradually seeing bloom and leaf
into life. As this month witnesses the beginning of
the sometimes slow and always interesting change
of foliage colors that precedes the clearing of bough
and twig for winter’s blasts, I have opportunity
to see how the autumn colors fit the picture.

It is unfortunate that more consideration is not
given to the effects that may be obtained by plant-
ing trees and shrubs with thought for their color
values the whole year round. That it is done in
some cases is usually because one of the greater
workers with nature’s paints—Olmsted, Manning
or some other of the few that know and use their

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 159

knowledge—has had opportunity to propose the
planting. Or mayhap the planter has been so
fortunate as to have visited the Arnold Arboretum
of Harvard University, or to have received its
bulletins, so as to observe or read how the great
world-master of shrubs and trees, Professor Sar-
gent, uses autumn leaf, bare twig color and endur-
ing bright fruits to add interest at the season mis-
called melancholy. The department-store type of
home-planting takes no account of such matters;
nor does the average nurseryman, I am sorry to
say, who is all too likely to sell the shrubs and
trees that grow most easily and look most impres-
sively large as young plants. It is as users of
plants and trees for the making of living pic-
tures in the open come to know what they can
have, and what may be accomplished at various
times of the year, that the proper shrubs will be
grown, and desirable individuality will be im-
pressed upon gardens. I have seen home-grounds
done sadly often upon the same general architec-
tural concept as that which has governed the
building in some cities of block on block, or row on
row, of identical houses. Even the individual bad
taste of using a Colorado blue spruce away from
absorbing and harmonizing greens is better than
the dread monotony of hydrangea “‘p. g.,”’ golden

160 MY GROWING GARDEN

glow, Spirea Van Houtter and a scant half-dozen
similar excellent but over-used shrubs.

What I am preaching now is planting for an
effect to suit the particular case at any time of
year, that effect to be what the planter himself—
or usually herself—individually believes to be the
best. And I preach again that this effect shall not
be a sheer imitation, sought for because seen and
liked somewhere else under totally different con-
ditions. I have in mind an example, where the
garden man—or woman, I think—had traveled
considerably, and seen much, but had not sorted
up with any particular care the impressions
received. One thing seen, admired and desired was
a rose-covered pergola; wherefore a brick pergola
was promptly built in the center of a flat open
space, at some distance from the pretentious
house and between two streets. It simply rose
out of the ground, leading nowhere, connecting
with nothing, and, even after the roses grew,
seeming purposeless. True, chairs were placed in
the center of the affair, but I never saw the time
when my friends had the “nerve” to sit in those
chairs! It would have been like gomg into a
“grand-stand” for a pageant, minus the pageant.
The whole effect was summarized by an acute
friend, who said, “‘Isn’t it painful?”

ee Med

PLATE XXX. “The stately . . . Japanese anemones are at their
best.”” (See page 161.)

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 161

But I am wandering far from home, and the
weather is too fine to stay away from my yet
growing garden, where I am sincerely trying, at
least, to work out pictures with plants right here,
and without thought of slavish imitation.

October surely provides me with some plant-
paints peculiar to the season. The stately, yet
lovely and dainty Japanese anemones are at their
best for full three weeks, and it is a very good best.
In the pink bed a great mass of Queen Charlotte
shows satiny flowers of a beautiful rose tint, and
the pure white Whirlwind is a drawing display
against the old arborvite hedge. Some plants in a
shady border hold back later, and one clump along
the axis walk combines its whiteness with the
lovely blue monkshood, Aconitum Fischeri var.
Wilsonw. It is a good combination.

Those same delphiniums mentioned so fre-
quently are yet a leading garden feature, for the
cutting away of the blooms without permitting
seed to be formed has caused them, assisted by a
liberal manure mulch and much water, to keep
right on blooming. Instead of becoming ragged by
reason of long bloom and cool nights, the scarlet
sage is finer than ever. In fact, about everything
that was blooming in September has concluded to
be “continued in our next,” and is with us yet. On

162 MY GROWING GARDEN

the second Sunday of the month I noted thirty-
four distinct flower species in good bloom, and
seemingly intending to keep on awhile.

The chrysanthemums are an October feature. I
have tried to get large-flowering hardy ’mums, and
I succeed in growing them easily enough, only they
are not hardy, and are gone by spring. This
October there are blooming some very lovely
flowers among the chrysanthemums, and my hope
for over-winter living is strong. Certain seedlings
with surprisingly good flowers are coming into
bloom. An exquisite light pink, Normandie,
has lasted three weeks in beauty; Lillian Doty,
a deeper pink, is also lasting; and there are yellows,
reds, and a persistent and lovely informal white—
Queen of the Whites—that I really want to
carry over and have more of. But if they fail?
Well, I’ve certainly had my money’s worth now,
and I can plant again without feeling cheated.

Part of my desire to have this class of chrysan-
themums “live over’? comes, I think, from two
memories. One is of the old home of my boyhood,
about which grew quantities of white, pink, red,
yellow and brown “‘frost flowers,” as we called
them, that just came each fall, and were never
renewed. Then I remember seeing, not once, but
often, masses of much larger ’mums in country

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 163

farm gardens, on the roads out from the city; and
of thinking that these were better than the florist’s
larger flowers.

Cosmos is another October joy. In this canden
cosmos, like pansies, seems to naturalize by self-
seeding, so that there will be hundreds of seedlings
of both next year. Each year I sow afresh, how-
ever, and this year I am enjoying a combination
suggested in one of the garden papers—that of
asparagus and cosmos. I transplanted the cosmos
into the asparagus border, with the result that
the fine foliage but sturdy stems of the juicy spring
vegetable have protected the cosmos while young, ©
and the two, grown up, mingle into a lovely riot
of flower and foliage. Heretofore the staking of the
cosmos has been necessary, but this year it has not
been required.

Pansies, as I have written, are practically
naturalized now in this garden, and must some-
times even be treated as weeds, though that is
cruel hard weeding. Each year I sow and grow
good “strains” of pansy, and they do exceedingly
prosper! This season there has been a continuous
performance for more than five months, the show
alternating sometimes and sometimes being simul-
taneous between two beds, one planted with pan-
sles grown from seed obtained in Portland, Oregon,

164 MY GROWING GARDEN

and the other disporting the best flowers of a
strain grown by a specialist in Massachusetts.
Honors are about even between them, though the
Massachusetts bed is likely to go into the winter
all blooming and happy, because it was cut down
once in summer, and very carefully fertilized then
with that powerful tonic, hen manure. Let me say
to any gardener growing pansies, that prosperity
in bloom and much good manure go together.
When there has been enough manure applied in
the ground, just put in, and on, as much again,
and take notice of the result.

Few garden makers realize, I think, that the
ordinary pansy of our pleasure, Vola tricolor, is
actually a perennial, and a nearly hardy perennial
at that. In England it is grown from cuttings and
kept alive from year to year. In the Breeze Hill
garden the survivals are usually of self-seedlings,
though one year it happened that a small group of
very good pansies was heavily fertilized late in
summer, and all the “leggy”’ stems cut off. A fine
fresh growth with prompt flowers resulted. By
accident, rather than by intention, this group of
pansies was given a protection of coarse refuse
and manure. In the very early spring the pansies
again began business, and the individual flowers
the second season were fully equal to the best of

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 165

the first season’s bloom. It is thus evident that
keeping your favorite pansies alive and blooming
is only a matter of a little attention. Most of us
will, I presume, continue to treat the pansy as an
annual, because that is the easier way—and we
American gardeners are strong on easy ways! :

I aim to get on as familiar terms with the
so-called Scotch, or tufted pansies, that are most
lovely, shade-enduring, and also continuous-flow-
ering, though not so large. Again I have old-
home memories of bright little “Johnny-jump-
ups, appearing each year in the garden, and show-
ing their impish monkey-faces almost underfoot.
I wish I might locate a few! I have, actually car-
ried along in life endured in the various city back-
yards in the thirty years since I saw the last of my
mother’s garden, two peonies and some lilies-of-
the-valley, both coming from a bed that must have
been at least thirty years old then. Perhaps it is
foolish sentiment to cherish these plants for their
origin; but I am not ashamed.

Not far from the beds of transcontinental
pansies there grows now a little mass of nigella, or
*‘love-in-a-mist,” a charming annual, altogether
pleasing. Its foliage is prettily cut, and its abun-
dant blue flowers do seem to be mist-surrounded —
by the foliage, while the seed-heads that follow are

166 MY GROWING GARDEN

entirely decorative. The scabiosa, or “mourning
bride,” is another of the really good annuals I have
enjoyed this year, as it nods its graceful stems in
the breeze, its odd but richly colored round blooms
at the tips. For cutting, no annual is better; the
flowers last long in the house. Arctotis grandis,
a newer annual, has given us many weeks of good
daisy-like flowers, and the splendid annual gail-
lardias seem not to know how to be out of bloom
at any time. But of all the annuals—and these
I am growing seem perennial—the wallflowers
are the most enduring and persistent. Blooming
now, and exceedingly sweet they are, in their
smoky browns and crimsons and dull yellows; and
they will probably be blooming under the snow at
Christmas, if there is snow then. The wallflower
is a sweetly scented and somewhat inconspicuous
member of the garden family with which I am
inclined to a much closer acquaintance.

All the garden standards are at their best in
October, as I have written. Particularly does the
lowly verbena enjoy the cool nights. Where it
grows, there were planted after July first some
gladioli bulbs, with the result that now the
stately spikes of scarlet ““War’ glow from a ver-
bena carpet, while white “Peace” and lovely
“America” rise in company. I know that a cer-

THE EARLY. FALL GLORY 167

tain strict ideal forbids such a use of either
verbenas or pansies; yet the effect seems here
entirely pleasing and in good taste.

A wonderful color contrast is available now in
the cut blooms of the brilliantly blue Salvia patens
grouped with the equally brilliantly orange flowers
of the calendula or pot-marigold. Both are bloom-
ing more abundantly than in the warmer days, and
it also seems as if the nearby petunias, dianthus
and snapdragons had received some especial
encouragement from the weather—or is it from
the heavy mulch of well-rotted manure that covers
the ground about them, and through which soaks
the water plentifully applied in consequence of
rainless weeks ?

Dahlias are perplexing in their behavior at
Breeze Hill. At first it seemed as if this must be
their long-lost home, so vigorously did they grow,
and so abundantly did they flower; but for several
years they have been slow to start, and reluctant
to bloom. This year the progress was not satis-
factory until early in this October, when an
awakening seemed to happen, so that now we have
superb flowers, and plenty of them. Of course they
will be at their best about the time of the first frost,
which will nip them more easily than it will any-
thing else! Even the nearby and really gorgeous

168 MY GROWING GARDEN

cannas will endure a little frost, but not so Madame
Dahlia. These cannas, by the way, are of the sorts
produced by Antoine Wintzer, as I have previously
written, and are most attractive, brilliant and satis-
factory. Each year I am likely to have a short
visit with this genial Alsatian, and then to hear
him tell of his aims in the further perfection of
specialty. He grows roses for a living, but I some-
times think he lives to grow cannas!

Of fruit in this young garden, we have yet the
grapes in bags, the bunches in the open having been
long ago eaten either by bipeds, hit by the one
mean hail-storm of the season, or punctured for the
sweet juice by myriads of bees. The paper pro-
_ tection covers from all these troubles, and it is a
fruit event to open a bag on a cool morning, taking
from it the chilled, ripe grapes in perfect condition.
Those strawberries I wrote about in September are
keeping right on with their blooming and bearing,
so that we are renewing our June days with them.
Hurrah for the Progressive! Then that late peach,
Krummell, has been giving us great golden globes
of rich yellow flesh all through two weeks, after
other peaches are only a memory. I can hurrah >
some for Herr Krummell, too!

In the earlier garden years we began to get
vegetable-poor in early October. Not so this year;

PLATE XXXI. ‘Celery just humping itself these cool nights.”’
(See page 169.)

se MI

Dr ic

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 169

there is an increasing abundance of the best, and
we hardly keep up, these days, more than a bowing
acquaintance with the butcher. Three sorts of
sweet corn, all really sweet; lima beans growing
and swelling so fast that we can’t possibly eat up
to them; a treat of Nott’s Excelsior peas, late
planted; tomatoes, carrots, beets, peppers, spinach,
snap beans, turnips if we want them (we don’t!),
lettuce of two sorts, parsley all the time, celery
just humping itself these cool nights to get ready
for use—what more could properly be asked of a
growing garden?

There is more; we have made the acquaintance
of kohlrabi this year, and it is an agreeable
acquaintance. I grew some of the White Vienna
sort, just to have it. The blue-green foliage, and
the nice little turnipy bulbs above ground were
first-rate to look at. A visit from my gardener
friend Rebe indicated a way to become more
intimate with this little-grown cousin of the cab-
bage and the cauliflower. Several of the pretty
bulbs were trimmed, pared, sliced, soaked in salt-
water, boiled in the same with several pourings-off,
and a cream dressing added. Result, a delicious
dish, attaining immediate popularity. The taste?
A little like cabbage, more like cauliflower, but
better than either, and wholly free from coarse-

170 MY GROWING GARDEN

ness, either of flavor or texture. We shall have suc-
cessions of kohlrabi hereafter, for it may be had
all seasons, it appears.

Here was a case in which “we all’ didn’t know
how to use to advantage a good food product; and
most Americans do not know at all about this, or
about many other excellent vegetables. Moreover,
when we do know how to use the garden bounty, it
is usually only in one or two ways, and seldom
does even so good a housewife as the one who
permits me to sit daily at her better-than-any-
hotel table know how to successfully preserve
vegetables that cannot be eaten fresh. It has been
stated that more than forty per cent of the vege-
tables grown in gardens go to waste, and I think
the percentage is even higher here; yet we come
to long in the winter for the succulent beans, the
luscious corn, the deliciously sweet peas, that were
superabundant in the growing time. My good wife
has tried, and tried; and though she is surely a
proficient at preserving and jellying and “butter-
ing’ fruits, and her pantry shelves are richly
stocked, she has not found the way to carry into
the winter the finer vegetables. Once there was
a six-hour boiling of snap beans. They “kept,”’
sure enough; but wrapping-paper to eat in any
other guise would have been just as undesirable!

THE EARLY FALL GLORY 171

I think the great department of bugs and diseases
and funguses and fruit troubles at Washington
might come sometime to helping the conservation
of vegetables, now that conservation is_ the
fashion !*

While the weather this October has been fine, in
its general comfort, there has been practically no
rain, and the hose has been kept going in the
garden much of the time. The notable Camp-
bell sprayer enables me to cause a gentle rain to
fall over or upon a fifty-foot circle, without “pack-
ing” the ground to any serious extent, while on
the grass walks the no less notable Skinner “lawn
mist” tool distributes a yet gentler ram with even
efficiency over a rectangle of eight by twelve feet.

Off in a half-shaded spot back of the fruit espa-
lier I have located the bed to which were trans-
planted the perennials that we will need next spring
to renew and to extend our plantings. They were
sown in July and August, and coddled a little with
shade and water in the coldframes. Now they
are growing lustily in the open, to winter over com-
fortably, I hope. Hollyhocks, columbines, arabis,

*After these words are written, I find there is vegetable conservation
proposed in Farmers’ Bulletin No. 359, of the Department of Agriculture,
entitled ‘‘Canning Vegetables in the Home.’’ The basis of safe preservation
of vegetables is, I read therein, in sterilization by heating at successive
times, as on three following days, rather than by one prolonged cooking.
I hope other garden-makers will send for that bulletin,

172 MY GROWING GARDEN

sweet williams by separate colors, delphiniums,
Iceland poppies, and so on—the fine old standby
sorts; plenty to plant, and more to give away.
Each year I note that we ought to plant them
earlier; and I trust next June will see us sowing
for the fall carry-over—though anyone who is
operating a personally-conducted garden is likely
to discover that sufficient unto June are the joys
thereof, without laying up much treasure in the
way of provision for another year.

These lovely October days, with a morning
tang in the air followed by mid-day mildness, give
us another use of the Breeze Hill garden. My good
wife’s Sunday school girls, mostly from gardenless
homes, romp over the lawns, delight in the flowers,
feast on the fruits, and pay for all of it by giving
me the joy of their joy, plus an opportunity to
use my camera on the picture they make when

grouped for an instant’s quiet.
At the last of the month, after a sharp frost
that made us chase for protecting burlaps and
boards, the autumn color is the feature. But that
is properly a November story; sufficient, full and
fine are the days of October!

CHAPTER XI—IN BETWEEN
CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS

6¢

O one in his senses would ever choose any
weed,” some one says. That depends, is
the answer; 1t depends on what is a weed,

in the first place, and on what kind of a weed it is,
once a plant has been so stigmatized. The sim-
plest definition of the word weed is “a plant out of
place,” and the unhuman scientist may be per-
fectly satisfied with that disposition of the lovely
mountain laurel or the aristocratic rhododen-
dron, when great specimens of either stand in the
way of a road or a building.

He would agree with a really delightful friend
of mine whose knowledge of plants is limited to
three: “fern,” “grass” and hydrangea. Of the
three, hydrangea (meaning the hydrangea “‘p. g.”’ I
have frequently mentioned) is in his view the most
important and valuable, and “grass” of next
desirability, “fern” being endurable under certain
conditions in which “grass”? cannot be made to
grow. All else that grows, of less stature than
trees, is either “‘weeds” or “‘brush,”’ and to be as
(173)

174 MY GROWING GARDEN

rapidly as possible substituted by grass or
hydrangea. Now my friend’s not extended knowl-
edge of the vegetable kingdom would only have
amused me, had he not been for many years a
man of authority about a summer-home mountain-
top, that mountain-top being in the heart of a bit
of primeval forest, with its flower-set “‘floor’” and
its native-shrub undergrowth. Acting on his
ideals, he had destroyed as weeds quantities of
the dainty pink moccasin-flower orchid, great
colonies of the sweet maianthemum, with New
England asters, clintonia, trilliums and the like,
as nature had planted them in more centuries of
time that he is years old; and he had “brushed
out” of the forest laurels and red-berried elders,
and superbly symmetrical old specimens of the
withe-rod viburnum, the high-bush huckleberry,
and other plant-citizens belonging in this favored
place. And then he sowed grass seed and planted
hydrangeas, so that this nave of God’s forest
temple might look like his Pennsylvania front
yard! The grass, finding little encouragement in
the mountain mold, was hard to establish, and
even yet the lovely partridge-berry and certain
of the buttercup family break through and put
the sickly grass-roots out of business. But the
hydrangea has grown vociferously, rampantly,

CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS 175

inexcusably, until its plants and their plumes
dominate the place for months.

Here, it may be noted, the “‘plant out of place”
definition is susceptible of more than one appli-
cation. To my friend, grass is the only plant good;
to me, his introductions are most certainly weeds
in this garden of God’s planting.

I think I may construct my own definition of a
weed as, in the first place, a plant of persistent
and spreading growth that is not sufficiently
beautiful in foliage or flower to commend it for
its own sake; or as a plant attractive in itself that
tends to possess the land to the exclusion of all
else. Thus the ox-eyed daisy is unquestionably a
weed, even though it is beautiful, because it
spreads rapidly and persistently, so that whole
fields on the careless farm wave with its flowers,
and justify the gibe of Dr. Bailey of Cornell, who
said to me, when once we passed such a display
of neglect, “That man is not a farmer; he’s a
florist!’ This same Dr. Bailey’s definition of a
weed as “a plant not wanted” is simple enough,
and true.

Of the first class of weeds are those I found per-
vading the land when we came to Breeze Hill. On
the preliminary trip to “look out” the place, the
ladies of the family accumulated on their clothing

176 MY GROWING GARDEN

ropes of “stick-tights” and my trousers were set
high with “Spanish needles.”” The poke-weed
leaves had not yet been frost-cut, and great bur-
docks rosetted what had been the lawn. Shep-
herd’s-purse, dandelion, wild carrot, plantain, but-
ton-weed, mustard, purslane—these and _ their
natural associates were playing the old game of
the survival of the fittest all about. Catnip was
everywhere, and of poison ivy there was more than
enough to fill an order my old nursery-friend Moon
once told me he had received from abroad for
“1,000 Rhus toxicodendron.” —

In the early spring the war began, and it lasted
over several succeeding springs before I could
come to feel that I was acceptable in the evolu-
tionary sense, and was surviving over the weeds
because I was fittest to survive. There were many
separate engagements, for in a curious fashion,
one weed at a time would seem to come to the
front and especially dominate all the ground. Ruth-
less and repeated uprooting, mean and hazardous
to do, rapidly disposed of the poison ivy.* The
poke-weed, which has a deep, fleshy, crooked white

*Just a word as toivy poisoning, to those susceptible—as I am not.
Whatever be the treatment adopted, let it be preceded by a hard scrub-
bing of the affected places with hot water and laundry soap, applied with a
stiff brush. This, if thoroughly done, tends to diminish the eruption and
especially to prevent the re-infection which otherwise does the most damage.

Puate XXXII. “Sunday-school girls, mostly from gardenless homes delight in the flowers.”’
(See page 172.)

i
i
ry
-
e 7 i
ww
A
mn
i
“

CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS 177

root and a top that comes off when you don’t
want it to as easily as one of those patent inter-
changeable umbrella handles, was the next con-
testant, and Mr. Phytolacca put up a hard fight
before he assumed a relation of only occasional
presence. Every bit of a root seemed to make a
new plant, and particularly in shady corners did
these flourish and flaunt and flower and seed.

I had all the broad-leaved docks uprooted that
first season, I thought. It was but a vain thought,
however, for there were more of them next season,
and the next. Ever try to dig a good husky dock,
Gentle Reader? Then you know how easily and
comfortably its soft top comes away, leaving a
root only encouraged to reach deeper by temporary
relief from foliage! Along the east end of the long
arborvitz hedge there was so much of both the
pervading docks that I thought they would be
exterminating each other, because of lack of food.
I had again forgotten that there was plenty of
room toward the center of the earth, and that the
Rumex family is not particular as to soil quality,
or shade, or sun, or moisture. Any old corner
will do as well as the center of the lawn, and there
will be dock prosperity in both.

The next battle was with “shepherd’s-purse,” a
rather neat-looking affair resembling sweet alyssum

178 MY GROWING GARDEN

gone wrong. It is an annual with the well-devel-
oped habits of the really criminal weed class; that
is, like dandelion, orange hawkweed (thank heaven,
I have none of that terror!), and the plantains, it
will accommodate itself to any condition, and
bloom under the lawn-mower or a foot high, accord-
ing to opportunity. And how it seeds and spreads!
The west garden plot, the soil of which I had to
make from raw, rough shale, was its favorite
growing spot, and it got in its fine work when I
had that in winter vetch over a season, for obtain-
ing humus and nitrogen. The shepherd’s-purse
(the name is absurd!) came up through the vetch,
and the only thing to do was to pull, pull, pull! One
merit the weed does have; its top is well fastened
to the long tap-root by which it prospers in any
drought, and if it is grasped by this and twisted a
bit, you can really get it out in moist weather. I
developed a continuous back-ache pulling shep-
herd’s-purse on wet days; but at last that weed
ceased to be of any particular importance. _
Then came the button-weed, that round-leaved
perennial which grows nice little “cheeses” about
one-sixth inch across—which same cheeses I
found palatable when I had a boy’s omnivorous
and continuous appetite. We are told that this
mallow harbors the fungus that interferes with the

CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS 179

prosperity of hollyhocks, wherefore it is placed in
the index eradicatorius. It has the same merit
as the capsella, or shepherd’s-purse; it doesn’t
easily lose its head. But its tap-root is likely to
be forked, and outrageously long. And it will
blossom and fruit and raise a numerous and ener-
getic family in two inches above the ground; while
I have found stems two feet long in a pasture. It
nearly had legs!

Of wild carrot and chicory and golden-rod I
have had but few, even though my surroundings
are heavy with them. For each I have admiration
as a flower, and I promise myself a border or a row
or two of them specifically planted in good ground,
and kept within the assigned space. If any white
flower surpasses the wild carrot in dainty grace and
decorative value, I have not seen it.

The lawn weeds I shall not write of until I take
up pen to confess my grass sins, which are many,
and to state my greensward hopes, which are only
moderately high.

I have written above of the weeds I have chosen
to destroy. There are some plants that I want to
have take the place of the really weedy weeds; for
I have made the not very original discovery that
nature’s disposition to get the ground covered is
worth working with, and not against. I’m willing

180 MY GROWING GARDEN

to have the great dame do the covering, but I
desire to nominate the coverers.

For instance, and as I have written elsewhere, I
cannot yet get the slopes of Lovers’ Lane ready for
the guests from the wild they are designed for.
Therefore I have encouraged the common blue
violet to take possession, and the said violet has
filled the order promptly. As I get other things,
some of the big violet clumps will simply pass on
to the muck-pile. In another location, I found the
English sweet white violet hardy and rampant,
and to it has been assigned important duties in
consequence. It is a pretty “swell” weed, if you
please!

About Breeze Hill there are many shady corners,
and some of them also are dry. Several years ago
at Eagles Mere I found the beautiful wild colum-
bine growing in shade, and in the dryness of a rock
crevice with very little soil. That gave me an idea,
and I collected a few plants, which have made gay
for several May weeks the southeast approach to
Lovers’ Lane. Carefully saving the abundant seed-
age, I sowed it favorably, and obtained at least a
thousand fine little plants. These have been trans-
planted into the difficult places, the sunless, mois-
tureless spots and corners; and certain slopes have
also been set with the columbines. This first season

CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS 181

the growth is good, and the bloom beautiful; but it
is only a mere hint of what is to follow as these
plants gain strength. The fine, fern-like foliage
lasts in complete greenness until frost, and is itself
of sufficient merit, if there were no bloom of scarlet
and gold on nodding stems, to commend the plant.
Isn’t this a good “‘weed”’ to choose?

The worst dock neighborhood has been cleaned
out again, and the space filled in part with the
columbine and in part with the common blue flag,
or German iris. The latter is vigorous, spreading,
almost evergreen, and entirely better than bur-
docks, isn’t it? t

Two other spots in the half-shade are now
given over to a certain plant of the strawberry
family—Duchesnea indica. It has good foliage, and
its little yellow flowers are followed by humbug
scarlet “‘fruits’ that hang long, and are immune
from human interference, because entirely taste-
less. This is another and excellent chosen weed,
and curiously enough, it is East Indian in origin,
becoming naturalized in Europe, and in some way
escaping the greenhouse “hanging-basket” so as
to have acclimated itself here. For the toughest
spot in my whole growing garden—the dry, root-
filled slope under the big west horse-chestnut—I
have started and growing a creeping ranunculus,

182 MY GROWING GARDEN

or buttercup, or crowfoot—Ranunculus repens.
Grass is impossible for this spot, but I have an
idea that the creeping buttercup may find the
place endurable, if not congenial. If it does grow
there, it is certainly no weed, for it will be very
much a plant in place, and not out of place. Yet
an authority on weeds—Harold C. Long—classes
this as “one of the worst weeds of arable lands!”

One formerly weedy corner of sterile ground I
have filled with Bocconia cordata, a perennial
growing to four or five feet, and with good foliage,
flowers and seed-pods. It is not a proper thing to
plant in a small garden, unless the roots are fenced
in by concrete or slate; for they spread rapidly,
and each little yellow rootlet that breaks off is
another plant in a hurry. It takes care now of
the weeds.

A fine yellow evening primrose that blooms all
day, making for several weeks a sheet of clear
lemon-yellow, is another chosen weed. It spreads
by creeping roots, and will overrun any location;
but it is easily “weeded out’’ when it gets too far,
and it will crowd out all ordinary sunshine weeds.
T am trying a half-dozen locations for it.

Sweet william will seed itself and keep on, and
it is another of the pervasive plants that I am
naturalizing in spots. (By the way, does Mrs.

CHOOSING YOUR OWN WEEDS 183

Gentle Reader notice that nice word—“natural-
ize?’ It means making a favorite plant a “weed,”
but it sounds much more elegant!) And I have
mentioned in other chapters the sweet tobacco and
the cosmos as controllable, chosen, “naturalized’’
weeds, quite able to hold their own, and some more.
Either makes a superb ground cover, and neither
is deterred by poor ground.

It is almost sacrilege, I fear, to speak of using
climbing roses as weeds. But I have done it; and
thusly. The south border or hedge-line of Breeze
Hill garden is a curve of nearly six hundred feet in
length. It is marked by a common barberry hedge,
and outside down to the sidewalk space, and from
that to the lower street, honeysuckle has been first
a ground cover, and then a dominating weed. On
the street side it is very fine and beautiful, but on
the hedge side it had begun to climb and to choke
even the lusty barberries. I had it rooted out com-
pletely on this side, and in its place, about ten
feet apart, I have set home-raised plants of Lady
Gay, Alberic Barbier, W. C. Egan, Wichuraiana
and Climbing American Beauty roses. They were
strung along the slope, and a little attention paid
to pegging down the long branches. In one season
the slope was fairly well covered, and the bloom
show was something to see! When the mat of

184 MY GROWING GARDEN

foliage has the strength of a year or two more of
growth, I anticipate the exclusion of the many
undesirable weeds that have made this slope hard
to keep in order. 3

Such has been the weed experience of this grow-
ing garden. From being at the mercy of undesira-
ble plants, extensively naturalized, I have come
to be master of some that are most desirable, and
the making at home of which is a pleasant task.
I shall expect each coming garden year to give me
knowledge of at least one plant able to qualify in
the chosen-weed class.

PuaTE XXXIII. “The long border of nicotiana and African
marigold . . . is now in perfection.”’ (See page 185.)

CHAPTER XTI—NOVEMBER
PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP

UT the garden doesn’t want to go to sleep!

The “taps” were sounded for it in a sharp

frost in the last October week, but the yet

warm ground pushes up through the live plant

roots a strong impulse to keep right on. And so

the garden does; it keeps on. The dahlias were

discouraged by the first frost, and other frosts

coming early in this Thanksgiving month have

put out of business a few of the annuals; but there
are plenty left to keep the garden gay.

Those great zinnias and the brilliant salvias
are yet happy, the cosmos is a pink-and-white
cloud, with ground snowy with its fallen petals,
and the long border of nicotiana and African
marigold that has followed the June show of
poppies is now in perfection. More than eighty
feet it runs, with a background of the now redden-
ing Japanese barberry hedge, and the sweet
tobacco opens its regular evening contribution of
white flowers well above it. The foliage of the
marigold, no less than its showy orange and yellow

(185)

186 MY GROWING GARDEN

flowers, makes the front of the border fine to see. I
have cut armful after armful of the great marigold
stems for decoration, and yet one can see no lessen-
ing of the border’s truly golden glow.

Here is a good example of what may be done
with annuals in one year’s round. First, the
December sowing of forty cents’ worth of Shirley
poppy seed, with its fine June result as previously
detailed in these pages; then the transplanting of
the nicotiana plants that had volunteered from
last year without cost, and of the marigolds that a
ten-cent packet of seed provided; and now we have
had two months of the fine fall display. The soon-
to-arrive “black frost’? will cut down this mass of
foliage and flowers in time to have the border
cleared, manured and dug, in preparation for next
spring’s new planting. Fifty cents m money
expenditure, a few hours of garden work, and about
fifty thousand flowers for parts of a whole season!
The one unpurchasable item, that of thoughtful
planning to get this effect, goes with the unsellable
satisfaction that the effect was obtained. The
latter important item is increased by the pleasure
this display has given to very many passers-by;
for any garden satisfaction of the eye that is not
shared is a poor sort.

The berry plants are now most pleasing; I mean

- PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP 187

those shrubs we grow not so much for their flowers
as for their fruit. Of these, our present favorite
is the “snowberry,’” which is well named; for its
lovely white-berried branches hang as if weighted
down with snow. Some of the cornuses and
viburnums are now in showy fruit, in a corner of the
older shrubs; and when I have sufficiently profited
by the Arnold Arboretum bulletins, I can have a
much finer summer and fall berry: show.*

The hardy chrysanthemums that began their
showing in October complete it in early November,
and then the flowers hang long, despite frosts,
unless there happens what came one November
second Sunday. A warm rain was followed imme-
diately by a bitter wind bearing on its breath a tem-
perature of twenty-two degrees, which simply froze
in the “mums and everything else, encasing the
flowers in solid ice. But that was only once, and it
is good garden philosophy to run chances in Novem-
ber. I remember visiting the little village of Cash-
town, in this state, to inquire about the chrysan-
themum ways of it—for ’mum-growing is there a
village function, and they “do” the flowers as well
as the city florists, selling them to sustain the civic-

*AsI have so frequently in these pages referred to the Arnold Arboretum
bulletins, I think I ought here to say that anyone may have them who
addresses that institution at Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, sending along
one dollar for the season’s issues.

188 MY GROWING GARDEN |

improvement league and to do other desirable
things for the community. Without glass protec-
tion, they certainly do run chances, and employ
expedients, as I understood when the husband of
one of the flower-women confided in me thus: “T
don’t mind takin’ up the settin’-room carpet, to
put over the dinged posies, an’ I didn’t fuss when
she took the comfort off the bed one cold night, but
I drew the line when she sent me in for my Sunday
overcoat!’ But I understood from the smiling
wife that she saved the ’mums!

Every morning when I hurry before breakfast
to the garden and find that the white mist I have
seen from my window has not frozen in the shelter
of the great arborvitz hedge, ’m thankful for
another day of bloom and its beauty. The flowers
owe me no more; I have been well paid, fully
paid, for all I have done; and this extension
is in the nature of an encore to which I have no
real right, but which I am very glad to have
accorded me.

The feast of vegetables continues, but it is natu-
rally waning. The last of the sweet corn was on
the table on the eighth day of the month, and that
means that we have had it continually since July
eighteenth—almost seventeen weeks of enjoyment
of the best of vegetables! Anyone may do as well

PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP 189

who will give thought to the succession he desires,
and proper cultivation to the corn he plants.
There were yet bush limas early in the month,
and upon the poles have matured a considerable
quantity of beans that will be useful in winter.
Carrots, salsify, and the chicory roots from which
I hope to force the “French endive” for salad in
winter are ready to store in our “root cellar” or
in outside pits. The celery is yet growing vigor-
ously, and it will not be dug until there is a cold-
wave flag flying. The blanching is being done by a
paper contrivance, slipped over the top, and of
course allowing the upper leaves to protrude. It
seems a clever and labor-saving device; though it
has been difficult for me to get into my head the
knowledge that it is not the touch of earth against
the celery plants, but the exclusion of light by any
means, that “blanches”’ celery and makes it tender.
Celery is a favorite vegetable in this family,
and it seems a favorite of this growing garden, in
which it does well. This year I have grown several
sorts for comparison, and by next month it will be
possible to get our own opinions. We have been
eating some Golden Self-blanching, but only after
it had had also the proper treatment to make it
tender; for I long ago discovered that color or its
absence in celery did not relate very closely to

190 MY GROWING GARDEN

flavor, tenderness or that crispness which makes
such a difference. I have had handsomely yellow
stalks that were stringy, tough and undesirable;
and I have broken thick, green stems full of delight-
fully “nutty” interior. “Handsome is as hand-
some tastes,” in our celery consideration.
November is the bulb-planting month. This
year we have at Breeze Hill largely increased the
preparations for spring bloom in the use of various
narcissi, or daffodils. My visits to Hunt’s bulb
garden last spring gave notes for extending the
show that we have heretofore had only from
Emperor, Empress, and Poeticus—after, of course,
the early Golden Spur. These excellent sorts are
of but two classes in the great family—Trumpet
and Poeticus. I found lovely flowers, quite dis-
tinct, in the Incomparabilis, Barrii and Leedsii
sections, and also, to my satisfaction, that they
could be had at no great cost. It was interesting
to see that while the daffodils of high degree, at
one to ten dollars per bulb, were usually very
beautiful or very large, or very both, they were not
the only large and beautiful and desirable varieties.
There was no repetition of my peony experience!
Consequently I have this month gotten into the
ground in several locations some twelve hundred
daffodil bulbs, placed with the idea of having them

PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP 191

paint themselves into the spring pictures, and there-
after naturalize into the edges of the lawn, not to be
meddled with until in two or three years they have
crowded themselves with their own increase. In
addition, there have been little colonies set in the
north border of the formal garden, including ten to
twenty-five each of some different and rarer sorts,
to be more closely under observation, as well as
to fit into the spring picture.

Another bulb preparation includes tulips that
are “‘different.”” One visit to Mr. Hunt’s garden
was at the time when there were blooming not only
some wonderful Darwin tulips, but no less won-
derful flowers of the Breeder, Bybloem and Bizarre
classes, and some dainty “botanical” varieties as
well. I had never dreamed of such subdued rich-
ness of tulip color as I saw there early one morning,
with the sun slanting its rays into their dew-jeweled
cups! I knew of rich scarlet, and clear yellow, and
deep crimson, and bright pink, and such pleasing
colors and tints; but the soft tones of buff, orange,
bronze, deep purple and smoky yellow-brown were
new to me as tulip colors. These, Mr. Hunt
explained, were the twentieth-century equivalent
of the tulips that had so excited fanciers in Holland.
and in England generations ago, but which had not
been pushed in the American market. Are we of

192 MY GROWING GARDEN

Uncle Sam’s children not able to appreciate and
admire these refined shades as well as our British,
Dutch and German cousins? I think so; and ’m
hoping to have some pilgrimages to my growing
garden next spring to see the tulips there planted
in the borders, in careful thought of color-con-
tiguity and with the fine background of the old
evergreen hedge.

The “species” or botanical tulips I may fail
with, since they are known to be impatient of
unsuitable places, and I have—as yet—no rock-
garden to provide root-coolness for them. But
I’m trying; and that is all I can do.

It would take too much space to tell here the
story of the garden wall at Breeze Hill, and why
and how it grew. It was, and is, part of the
development of the idea, and my slowness to see,
my lack of foresight, have made it more expensive
and less satisfactory than it ought to be. It is
just possible that it will fall down, in part, if I
may take notice from certain suspicious cracks in
the careless masonry. If it does, I shail be pocket-
sorry and garden-glad; for when it goes up again,
on the very same lines, it will be a really truly
garden wall, with deep crevices for rock plants,
and a certain-sure foundation. I have been the
victim of the mason; I hope to be his master, next

either side the garden entrance a fine red
cedar.”’ (See page 193.)

PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP 193

time, and to impress upon his Dutch stolidity the
idea that I am to have what I want in a wall if he
is to have what he wants in pay for erecting one!

But this November I have celebrated that wall
by planting at its western face, on either side the
garden entrance, a fine red cedar, or “‘juniper”’ as
we used to call it as a Christmas tree. These cedars
seem to stand there as posts of a gateless and
hospitable entrance, and I like their slim green-
ness. And I have planted along the wall, soon to
cover it if it does not fall, the fine evergreen vine
Evonymus radicans. It is a clinger, and its neat
foliage is right for these limestone boulders.

All the month the ground is workable, and much
transplanting has been done, as well as much pre-
paring for the hurried spring. It seems time, even
ahead of a killing frost, to put the garden to sleep,
and I have not hesitated to cut off tops on plants
I want to move, and thus to prepare for the win-
ter’s rest. As I have written, many hundreds of
brown bulbs have been put to sleep in the ground,
and wherever I can clear up a bed or border, it is
carefully mulched with loose manure, as protection
for the winter. Not yet may I cover everything,
for it seems best to wait until a little frost hardens
the ground over the bulbs, ere the protection
is applied.

194 MY GROWING GARDEN

Bean-poles are pulled up, tomato-stakes col-
lected, leaves raked away—but not many have
yet fallen—and every bit of trash that can be
rotted is taken to the compost heap, which is
once carefully turned and thoroughly wet during ©
the month.

But now comes a snow flurry, and more nights
with light frosts. The autumn color, often rather
flat and monotonous in this Susquehanna valley,
begins to be notable here, and a new garden glows
before our eyes. The contrasts are striking, and
on every side the eye is entranced with nature’s
final burst of color. Here are the lilacs and the
mound of honeysuckle at the carriage step, in full,
deep, rich and glowing summer green, untouched
by frost, and with here and there in the honey-
suckle a dainty and almost super-sweet flower.
The arborvite hedge has a brown undertone to
its dull green, but next to it there flames a dog-
wood, crimson in foliage and scarlet in fruit, and
a Viburnum tomentosum, in deeper crimson. Of
course my huckleberries, little though they are as
yet, are showing the fall blood-red foliage that is
but one of their merits, while not far away there
are spireas and other shrubs in full summer
foliage of green.

In the Arboretum bed are some cotoneasters,

PUTTING THE GARDEN TO SLEEP 195

low and compact shrubs new to me until recently.
Their small foliage is deep and glossy green,
flecked here and there with rich crimson, to which
hue it will all turn soon, I infer. On that garden
wall the Ampelopsis Engelmannw is flaunting
scarlet banners, while the nearby hanging shoots
of the Wichuraiana rose are yet in entire green.
The roses in the “‘species bed” are bare, save one,
Rosa carolina, which is rampant in young shoots
and brightest green.

The big oakleaves of Hydrangea quercifolia
have taken on a peculiar and striking bronzy hue,
like nothing else. Those two large Buffum pear
trees are in blossom again, seemingly, but it is a
bloom of fire, for the foliage is indescribably
ablaze in red and yellow and bronze.

Rather suddenly the horse-chestnuts turn yel-
low in foliage, and the great west tree becomes a
clear and lucent color that sends a glow into the
nearby windows. Hardly a leaf had it dropped
until one morning toward Thanksgiving, after the
first real freeze, it shed all its immense mass of
foliage in about three hours, appearing by noon
cleanly bared for winter.

Of all the autumn color show, the part furnished
by the barberry hedge is the finest. Beautiful
every hour in the year, its fall changing is an

196 MY GROWING GARDEN

intensification of that beauty. The change begins
early, and is in progress slowly for many weeks,
until suddenly it glows in a deep scarlet-crimson,
amidst which its clear scarlet fruit, hanging in
graceful sprays under the arching twigs, is the
accented note. What a shrub it is! Hardy, ser-
viceable, able to endure shade and yet to revel in
sun; needing no trimming at all, holding interest
all the time; getting along in poor ground but
rejoicing abundantly if better treated; is it not
the one best low-growing shrub?

So closes the month, in a glow of autumn color,
fading slowly, dropping softly to the ground. It is
a joyous ending to a lovely season in this growing
garden.

CHAPTER XITI—DECEMBER
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

YHE Christmas month, in this climate, is not
one of garden growth, to any great extent.
It is a time of expectation, in that a freeze-
up is presumably imminent on any December
night. It is a time for protection, as well; for after
that first freeze-up, which ideally should be a mild
one, it is orthodox to tuck in the covers, draw up
the blankets, and make sure that the garden plant-
folk are all “comfy” for the winter. It is this pro-
cess that promotes retrospect, and it is a queer
gardener who is not also continually thinking of
the future, of next year’s prospect.

But December is not all bleak winter here, by
any means. The earlier days are often mild and
pleasant, and the hardier remainders of the gar-
den year take prompt advantage of any sun-
encouragement. During the first week of the
month I have found scabious, candytuft and gail-
lardias in comfortable bloom. Of course I expect
to see pansies opening in every month in the year,
and have not now, nor often, been disappointed.

(197)

198 MY GROWING GARDEN

Then the wallflowers, bless them! do not regard
winter as of any importance until at last Jack
Frost repeatedly freezes them into insensibility.
One year the ground was unfrozen when the first
deep December snow arrived, covering everything
with its soft mantle. There followed weeks of the
sharp steady cold of an ideal winter; but in Jan-
uary a thaw set in that in a day cut down the snow
blanket to a mere gauze sheet. What was my sur-
prise to find that the sinking snow uncovered wall-
flowers that had seemingly opened their blooms
under it, and were in entire perfection when the
sun reached them!

And on Christmas day in one of the happy
Breeze Hill garden years I have found and gloat-
ingly taken to the home-guests that day assembled
flowers of the pansy, the English daisy and the
wallflower. These latest flowers are doubly appre-
ciated, and have an appeal not possessed by the
great rich greenhouse roses one buys.

So long as the ground can be handled and
worked, we keep at it. Early in December I have
marked out, in prospect for next and later years, a
new walk across that part of the west garden last
devoted to a potato failure, and since under such
further amelioration of its soil as will give me
hope of accomplishing real gardening on it another

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 199

year. The marking out has been made permanent
by the use of iron-pipe posts instead of the wooden
stakes, so easy to drive, so brittle in the winter,
and so likely to have disappeared next spring. I
get from a junk-dealer such pieces of three-quarter
or inch iron pipe as he has in his possession, and
with a hack-saw or a pipe-cutter quickly reduce the
incidental lengths to an even size of fifteen inches.
These seldom cost more than a cent each, and they
serve the marking purpose both well and perma-
nently. It is one of the garden jokes to report the
whispered question of a visitor, who, seeing the
pipe stakes of the curving walk, not yet driven
down even with the ground, said in my ear,
“T suppose those pipes are part of your irrigating
system?”

I have to deal in this whole home place with a
piece of ground that is not rectangular, but a
segment of a circle; and as the house was origi-
nally placed with reference to a road since aban-
doned, and the present street plan has no relation
to that road, some perplexing problems have
appeared. Of course, since Mr. Manning supplied
me with the idea that the garden axis had to be
that of the house, there is a base-line to work from.
The nearest street-corner right-angle provides
another base-line, and the desirable retention of

200 MY GROWING GARDEN

the old hedges, several of them on curves, has not
lessened the complexity of the layout. It took me
several hours to connect the house axis with the
not parallel street line by means of the new walk
above mentioned, because I had to construct a
curve of several radii—and I certainly am no
engineer !

The process was to drive in little wooden pegs
every three feet on what seemed to be the right
curve, and then to more completely visualize this by
drawing along the stakes a white garden line. The
curve was not at all right; and then followed shift-
ing of the stakes many times until my eye was
satisfied. (My printer associates hint that it is
unreasonably hard to satisfy that eye, by the way !)
Then the iron-pipe stakes were driven along the
convex side of the curve, three feet apart, and a
foot deep, leaving three inches out of the ground
to serve until the grass that will be sown in early
spring has completely defined the walk.

The same sort of markers have been used for
garden beds and borders all over the place, driving
them even with the ground, so that a lawn-mower
will not notice them, but an investigating finger
will, when it is desirable to make sure of lines or
corners or curves.

Now that the leaves are all down, I find where

PLaTE XXXV. ‘The barberry hedge, now purely lovely .. .
The rhododendrons, snow-bound, look happy.”
(See page 205.)

"
be
. .
“\
“pos
ats

f wa

a AS

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 201

the mean oyster-shell scale has hidden upon cer-
tain lilacs and dogwoods. He and his million-
family are given an overcoat of strong lime-
sulphur, which I wish they may enjoy! I find
here and there insect egg-masses, which are
abolished. The trees trained on the espalier are cut
loose for the winter, so that we may get back of
the tied-up stems with spray fluid. The stems of
the peach and the apples trees are examined for
borers at and below the ground-line, and these
are tickled to death, when found by knife or
pointed wire.

The sun-dial ivy is a problem. I like the Eng-
lish ivy, and it is just the thing to cover the brown-
stone pedestal on which is supported the hour-
marking device. Unfortunately, the ivy has
frozen back to disreputability every year, which
means that for about five growing months the
pedestal is either uncovered or raggedly covered.
Last year, therefore, I concluded to say farewell to
the ivy, and to depend for sun-dial greenery upon
the definitely hardy Evonymus radicans, a most
excellent evergreen climber. But I could not be
hard-hearted enough to tear out the ivy roots
when I planted the evonymus, so I merely cut off
the old bedraggled stems of it. Behold! it has
possessed the pedestal, covered up the evonymus,

202 MY GROWING GARDEN

and several times during the summer I have had to
restrain its ambition to cover the dial itself by
cutting back its exuberant branches. Now that
winter is impending, I am anxious to carry it
through substantially unharmed. Previous pro-
tection by cedar boughs has been inadequate; and,
after much consideration, I have wrapped it about
with burlap, loosely applied, and most unpleasing
to see. The spring will show—what?

All the vegetables are out of danger now,
either in securely covered trenches, or in a cellar
that I can hold at close to forty degrees Fahren-
heit all winter. The ground from which they were
lifted has been raked smooth, and if I had time
would all be manured and dug before freezing. I
have had time to get ready a “row” for the earliest
peas and spinach; and my son has looked spring in
the eye in making a new sort of concrete coldframe
range from which he expects interesting results;
but that is too much of a story to tell before
Christmas.

With all there is to do in the hours that may be
taken from the office-desk at which is earned a
living and the money to play with a growing gar-
den, there yet remains some time and much
inclination for retrospect and prospect. As I walk
about, my forward-looking mind sees many things

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 203

to do, and it draws pictures for me on that flexible
canvas, my imagination. But today it has harked
back to the first December, five years ago, and it
bids me dwell on memories rather than on antici-
pations. I see what the years have worked out for
me, under God’s sunshine and rain, on this once
forbidding and now attractive spot. I see how my
vague ideals have been clarified, how my hardly
less vague desires have been changed, in the years
of outdoor effort and thought. I am keenly sensible
of the kindness of better gardeners who have been
patient with my crudities, recognizing, perhaps, the
inner striving in the right direction.. My mistakes!
How many they have been, and how vexatious
when discovered, until I learned to recognize them
as actual onward steps, to laugh at them and their
maker, and to arrive at the knowledge that I was
quite certain to keep on making garden errors, but
might hope, with sufficient thoughtful humility,
to avoid making the same error twice.

Looking backward, I note the transition from
reading books about gardens to doing work in one
of them, and how it gradually came to pass that
I read less, and only of standard substantialities
that might be termed principles, because I found
that I must work out my own garden salvation,
and work it out, if not with fear and trembling,

204 MY GROWING GARDEN

certainly with an open mind and a humble dis-
position. If I may be pardoned the personality of
it, I may say, too, that the garden-work stopped a
rather busy pen for a while. How could I take
time to write of anything—gardening or printing,
civics or photography—when there was such an
open volume to read as I walked and worked and
thought? Of this kind of reading I have done much,
and profited by it some at least, in these garden
years. Now that something has moved me to
write again, I am but talking with whoever reads,
feeling hopeful that those who have followed the
fortunes of this growing garden along through the
months have arrived at some sympathy with and
understanding of my plain statement of happen-
ings and hopes, of errors and satisfactions.

In this retrospect, I observe that much has been
done at Breeze Hill, from the standpoint of the
gardenerless-garden and the scanty pocketbook,
though it would be little indeed in comparison
with what many men of large means have accom-
plished in less time. Such men’s gardens interest
me to look at, and in part to profit by; but I take
it more men of little means who ought to make
grow a garden of their own will see these words
than will millionaires whose very weight of wealth
makes an individual garden almost impossible for

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 205

them. So my measure of accomplishment in work-
ing over this run-down old place is only to be con-
sidered in connection with the expenditure of time
and money possible to many another man who will
be made a better worker at his business or profes-
sion if he will undertake the garden cure.

There has been a heavy snow, and I write look-
ing west through Lovers’ Lane, where I see the
planting of rhododendrons along the old-looking
but quite recent stone walk that has taken the
place of the weedy, rutty farm lane of five years
ago. The rhododendrons, snow-bound as they are,
look happy, and are happy; and I know that at
their feet, and along the walk on both sides are
safely tucked away scores of woods favorites in
this place reserved for American natives only.
Just around to the right there is, I also know, a
planting of daffodils that will surely look better
than did the poke-weed that overran the same
place five years ago. To the right also, and follow-
ing the line of the old hedge that has been petted
and trimmed and fertilized all I dare, more and
other daffodils will come, and later Easter lilies
and later yet fine little yellow button chrysanthe-
mums, where reigned supreme dock and nettles
in the old days.

Looking southwest, I see the youngest part of

206 MY GROWING GARDEN

the garden, with its borders and the Arboretum
bed, its grass driveway, its almost concealed range
of coldframes facing the winter sun, its new plant-
ing of pet evergreens. That was a wreck of dead
pear trees five years ago! Beyond, I see the bar-
berry hedge, now purely lovely because of the
way in which it carries its snow load, and I remem-
ber that when I came here there were fences that
were offenses—great scroll-sawed contortions of
pine boards—because they said plainly, “Stay
out!’ This hedge, which is only a marking line
after all, says “Look in!”

Walking out in the snow—and I love it more
than I did that first winter—I turn into the formal
garden which has taken the place of two broken-
down buildings—an ice-house and a greenhouse—
that made the place forlorn when I came. In it I
see the rose-arbor, now trebly covered with a mat
of prosperous rose-twigs, snugly protected with
the unused Christmas trees I have picked up, and
thick with this clinging snow. Under these nearby
flat white expanses I know there are perennial
plants of many sorts, ready to be born again in
spring; and they grow in what was formerly the
foundation of that greenhouse.

A bit farther along, and there is a glimpse of the
fruit-garden, looking clean and trim, and also

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 207

ready to serve me beyond my deserts when its
time comes. And this has taken the place of an
abandoned, overrun, ridgy, dying vineyard of
five years ago!

All this change; and yet it is, and looks like,
an old place. Not only had I a memory of my
own old home place to restrain me, but I had the
admonitions of Mr. Manning, to prevent the sort
of horror I have so often seen with sadness—the
cutting down of everything, so as to “‘start afresh.”
Here, instead, the old features have been zeal-
ously preserved, and the new plantings and pla-
cings adapted to them. The result is a mature and
home-ly (please note the hyphen, and what it
means) beauty that could not have been had ina
generation if we had “‘started afresh.”’

The retrospect is pleasing, at least to us of the
growing garden, in and with which we also have
grown and gained in spirit and in health. Now
what of the prospect?

These vista plant-pictures are to be perfected,
so that they will tell us in every season more of the
goodness of the God of the outdoors. This implies
study, effort, fruitful mistakes, trials, changes.
Then I want here gathered, not in a museum fash-
ion of orderly display, but as part of a living and
growing garden, all the good plants, particularly

208 MY GROWING GARDEN

of Pennsylvania, that can be happily located. I
want also the less well-known shrubs, especially
of fascinating West China and mysterious Thibet,
to show here to visiting Americans what they may
additionally have of loveliness in leaf and flower.
I want good fruits—I have already supplemented
those fine fall-bearing Progressive strawberries
with a red raspberry said to come along in company
—and new roses that are worth while.

The vegetable part of the garden I hope to see
take cognizance of other things that we ought to
like, and to repeat many times the success of the
kohlrabi. I hope constantly to improve the tex-
ture and the productivity of the soil. I want to
some time have really good lawns—for it may have
been noticed that I have kept quiet about lawns,
for reasons, many reasons—and I dream of grass
drives as deep and velvety and wear-resisting as
those of my old acquaintance Olcott in Con-
necticut.

And I must not forget my dream of a little
well-placed rock-garden, in which may be made at
home a host of lovely plants that demand cool
roots, and a chance to nestle under the edge of a
boulder. There is a place for it, I think; and also a
place for just a bit of a water garden, well cir-
cumstanced, in which I may see bloom the lovely

Puate XXXVI. “The-fruit garden, looking clean and trim. .. .
The rose-arbor . . . thick with this clinging snow.”
(See page 206.)

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 209

hardy water lilies, and around which may be gath-
ered some wet-footed plants.

There are two old cherry trees in the front lawn
that are dying. At the foot of the most decrepit
is growing the Excelsa rose previously mentioned,
which in one season has mounted about fifteen feet
(as shown on the frontispiece), and ought in due
course to swing its crimson garlands in the breeze
from the topmost remaining limbs another year.
This is the trial; and if it seems a success, the other
old veteran will change its bearing in June from
cherries to roses, or mayhap wistaria.

Other things are to be done. The good plants
I want to naturalize as “weeds” are to be selected
and placed; the iris planting is to be made more
representative; a peony garden will come if
“shekels’” appear for it; some North Carolina
mountain evergreen shrubs—the leucothoé, the
galax, and certain azalea-rhododendrons—are to
fill a corner that will be home for them, I hope; a
long hedge of climbers, not roses, is to form a
semi-screen for the west garden. Thus, and other-
wise, the garden is to grow; for it is, and has been,
a true growing garden. And I have thought it
worth while, in planning and planting, to take into
account what would happen if again this old place
were abandoned. God willing, I believe that even

210 MY GROWING GARDEN

then it would continue to be a growing garden. I
should like no better epitaph than that it might be
said, after I have passed along to other labors,
that here dwelt a’man who loved a garden, who
lived in and grew with it, and who yet looks upon
it, even from afar, as a garden growing for all who
love the beauties of God’s green earth.

INDEX

Abelia grandiflora commended,
136.

Aconite, Wilson’s, in bloom, 161.

Aluminum wire for trellis, 59.

Alyssum, yellow, blooming, 84.

Ampelopsis Engelmannii in
autumn, 195.

Anchusa not admired, 132.

Anemone, Japanese, in bloom,
161; illus. facing 161.

Annuals, result in one year, 186;
in September, 155.

Anthracnose on sycamore, 53.

Apple, Bismarck, discussed, 147;
Smokehouse, special planting,
63.

Apple blooms, when to spray, 77;
illus. facing 77.

Apricot in bloom, 65; fruiting, 114.

April rain, value of, 67.

Arabis in bloom, 84.

Arborvitzas in snow, 10; illus.
facing 9.

Arctotis grandis, 166.

Arnold Arboretum mentioned, 42,
84, 159; purpose of, 61; bul-
letins mentioned, 187.

Artemisia lactiflora blooming, 135.

Aster beetle combated, 130.

Asters, China, 129 (illus. facing
128); King varieties, 152.

Asters, hardy, treatment of, 152.

Autumn color, a feature, 172;
dull, 194; glowing, 194; plant
for, 41.

Autumn not melancholy, 3.

Bailey, Dr. L. H., mentioned, 175.

Barberry, common, blooming, 84.

Barberry, Thunberg, hedge
blooming, 80; reddening, 185;
sleet-covered, 28 (illus. facing
29); snow-covered, 206.

Berried plants, 187.

Bible, garden quotation, 105.

Blackberries bearing, 113; beauty
of bloom (illus. facing 84);
trained on wires, 114.

Blackbirds a nuisance, 115.

Bloodroot, 15.

Blue spirea blooming, 134.

Bocconia cordata, 129, 182.

Boltonia discussed, 152.

Border of nicotiana and marigold,
185.

Borers combated, 37.

Breeze Hill has a name, 4; shape
of, 12.

Buddleia discussed, 136.

Bulbs planted in November, 190.

Butterfly bush discussed, 137.

Button-weed, 178.

(211)

212

Calendula, in contrast, 167.

Campanula Medium, in combina-
tion, 100.

Cannas, persisting, 168; Wintzer
varieties, 86, 102.

Capsella, 177, 179.

Carnations, Margaret, early sow-
ing, 26.

Carriage approach staked out, 20.

Caryopteris incana (Mastacan-
thus), 134.

Catalogues, lure of, 21, 26.

Cedars, Red, planted, 193; illus.
facing 193.

Celery, planted, 112; in Novem-
ber, 189.

Ceratostigma blooming, 153.

Cherries fruiting, 97.

Chinese shrubs, 62.

Chromatic balance of seasons, 123.

Chrysanthemums, an October fea-
ture, 162; at Cashtown, 187;
varieties mentioned, 162.

Coldframe in sheltered spot, 20.

Colorado blue spruce, 125.

Color compensation of seasons,
123.

Columbine, finest strain, 23; Long-
spurred, 101.

Columbine, wild, as weed, 180.

Conoclinium celestinum, 133.

Conodoguinet Creek, wild flowers
along, 15.

Corn, Rainbow, not admired, 125.

Corn, sweet, satisfactory, 144;
seventeen weeks of it, 188;
transplanted, 110; varieties
mentioned, 85.

INDEX

Cosmos, 185; in October, 163.

Cotoneaster mentioned, 194.

Crocuses blooming, 44, 64; illus.
facing 44.

Currant bushes injured by scale,
35.

Cypripedium acaule, 71.

Daffodils in April, 66 (llus. facing
60); naturalized, 190; <dllus., —
colored, facing 65. .

Dahlias, May planting, 86; Per-
plexing, 167.

Daisy, English, in winter, 198.

December, flowers in bloom, 197.

Delphiniums, late bloom, 161.

Delphiniums, perennial, bloom-
ing, 122; satisfaction with, 133.

Deutzias blooming, 83.

Dianthus, late bloom, 167.

Docks uprooted, 177.

Dogwood in bloom, 83; men-
tioned, 15.

Dutchman’s breeches, 15.

Dynamite for cultivation, 30. -

Eagles Mere mentioned, 126.

Elder, golden-leaved, 124; native,
19.

Engelmann spruce in native

. haunt, 125.

Zisculus parviflora in bloom,
119. :

Espalier, details of, 54; fruiting,
141; illus. facing 140.

Eupatorium ageratoides, 153.

Eupatorium mentioned, 133.

Evonymus radicans, 193, 201.

INDEX

Failures to be confessed, 9.

Farr, B. H., mentioned, 99.

Fertilization needed, 29; not con-
sidered, 29.

Filipendula hexapetala, 135.

Flicker drumming on roof, 116.

Flower seeds germinating, 47.

Forsythia blooming in April, 65
(illus. in color, facing 65);
forced, 21.

Freeze-up in November, 187.

Fruit flowers in May, 76.

Fruit-garden, dwarf, 54 (illus.
facing 124); in winter, 206.

Fruit trees, summer pruning, 140;
trained specimens, 54.

Gaillardias, perennial, blooming,
138.

Garden, clearing up, 194; plan-
ning, 14; tillage, 145.

Garden in April, illus. facing 68;
in August, facing 132.

Gardens, imitative, 18.

Garden without a gardener men-
tioned, 204.

Getting into the ground, 27.

Gladioli, planted late, 101; late
bloom, 166.

Grapes, at Breeze Hill, history of,

_ 148; bagging the bunches, 114;

Green Mountain ripening, 142;
protecting from _ steel-blue
beetle, 150; in bags, 168.

Grass seed, understanding of, 25.

Green manuring, importance of, 33.

Helenium autumnale rubrum, 154.
Hemlock, 16.

213

Herbaceous plants in May, 84.

Heuchera, 100.

Hollyhock in bloom, 120; illus.
facing 113.

Honesty in bloom, 84.

Honeysuckle, Japan, on old stump,
103; zllus. facing 104.

Horse-chestnuts, autumn color,
195; dominating, 17; flowers,
72 (illus. facing 72); twigs in
early spring, 27.

Horse-chestnut, dwarf, in bloom,
119.

Humus, need for, 29.

Hunt, Chester Jay, mentioned,
191.

Hydrangea arborescens grandiflora
blooming, 118, 158.

Hydrangea quercifolia, 158; au-
tumn color, 195.

Hydrangea radiata mentioned, 119.

Hydrangeas worth while, 16.

Hydrangeas, wrong use of, 174.

Individual treatment, 8.
Inventory of old place, 11.
Iris, English, blooming, 100.

Iris, German, as weed, 181;
massed, 81.
Iris, Japanese, blooming, 100;

illus. facing 100.
Iris, Spanish, blooming, 100.
Iron-pipe posts, 199.
Ivy, English, on sundial, 201.

Kohlrabi, acquaintance made, 169.

Laurel in bloom, 102.
Lawns, fall recovery, 157.

214

Lawn work in spring, 60; view,
illus. facing 176.

Leaf-mold, cost of, 32.

Lilac, buds in March, 27; from
Bulgaria, 17; twig tone in
spring, 42.

Lilacs blooming, 82.

Lilies, tiger, failure with, 131.

Lilium candidum blooming, 101; L.
Henryi, 131.

Lima beans in use, 111.

Linden in winter, 10; 2lus. facing
16.

Love-in-a-mist, 165.

Lovers’ Lane, plants of, 70;
spring flowers in, 65; wild
flowers in, 65.

Malus (Pyrus) floribunda in
bloom, 77, 81.

Manning, Warren H., mentioned,
7, 153, 199, 207.

Maple, Norway, blooming, 65.

Marigold, African, 185; illus.
facing 185.

Markers, permanent, 199.

May-apple, 15.

Mertensia virginica, 15.

Mitchella repens, 75.

Mock oranges, a month of bloom,
84.

Monarda ‘‘Cambridge Scarlet’’
not admired, 134.

Mourning Bride blooming, 166.

Muck-pile commended, 31.

Mulberry, first discovery, 14;
long-fruiting, 114.

Myrtle, blue, 79.

INDEX

Narcissi, in crescent border, 67;
varieties, 66, 190.

Narcissus, Golden Spur, blooming,
66.

National flower of America, 102.

Nicotiana, 121, 140, 185; illus.
facing 185.

Nigella, 165.

Norway maples pervading, 5.

Norway spruce as protection, 12;
not American, 17.

Novelties, how they happen, 22;
trial of, 22.

November flowers yet blooming,
185.

Pansies in winter, 198; natu-
ralized, 163.

Pansy as a perennial, 164.

Peaches ripening, 147.

Peach, Krummell, 147, 168, 169.

Peas, beauty of bloom, 88; early
maturing, 96; planting early, 45.

Pennsylvania native shrubs pre-
ferred, 16.

Peonies, experience in selecting, 98.

Peony, tenuifolia, in bloom, 84.

Perennials transplanted, 171.

Pergola wrongly placed, 160.

Periwinkle, blue, 79.

Persimmon, overlooked, 10; cross-
ing, 14; fruit, 13.

Petunia, late bloom, 167; satis-
factory, 155.

Philadelphus, Avalanche, 103.

Phlox divaricata, 15.

Phlox Drummondii, mixture, 155.

Phlox, hardy, not prosperous, 122.

INDEX

Phytolacca as a weed, 177.

Pictures in the open, living, 159;
in plants, 38, 207.

Pine, white, 16.

Plant catalogues discussed, 41.

Plant competition, 128.

Planting, color consideration, 39.

Planting, early, 49; for color
value, 158; form consideration,
39; inappropriate, 159; in varied
exposures, 75.

Plants out of place, 175.

Plumbago blooming, 153.

Plums, Japanese, in bloom, 65.

Poison-ivy, treatment for, 176;
uprooting, 176.

Poke-weed destroyed, 176.

Poppy, plume, 129.

Poppy, Shirley, in border, 97;
illus. in color, facing 97.

Portulaca blooming, 138.

Potato, failure with, 107.

Primrose, evening, 100; as a weed,
182. :

Pussy willow, buds opening, 44.

Pyrus (Malus) floribunda in
bloom, 77, 81.

Quinces in winter, 10.

Radishes in April, 56; with coarse
tails, 24.

Ranunculus, creeping, as weed, 181.

Raspberries, 96, 113.

Red-bud mentioned, 15.

Rhododendron, Carolina, 86; in
snow, 205; maximum, in bloom,
102, 117 (illus. facing 117);
native, 18; planting, 72.

215

Rhubarb, early forcing, 46.
Robins at home, 115.
Rock-garden desired, 208.

Rose, “black spot,” 127; Excelsa,
climbing on cherry tree, 209;
illus. color, frontispiece; Gruss
an Teplitz, 157.

Rose-garden, old, 89; -arbor in
bloom, illus. facing 89.

Rose-hedge not possible, 19;
special treatment, 92.

Roses, June high-point, 89; early
planting, 50; in August, 127;
varieties blooming, 95, 157, 158.

Roses, climbing, as weeds, 183;
named, 91, 183.

Roses, rugosa hybrids, 19; bloom-
ing, 94.

Salvia patens blooming, 122, 167.

Salvia, scarlet, 122, 154, 185.

San José scale, Dr. Bailey’s view,
146.

Scabiosa blooming, 166.

Scale, oyster-shell, 201; San José,
146.

Scilla in bloom, 64.

Sedum spectabile blooming, 153.

Shasta daisy blooming, 121.

Shepherd’s-purse, 177.

Shrubs, blooming in June, 102;
medium size preferred, 43;
price and quality, 43; Septem-
ber-blooming, 156.

Skees in use, 20; zllus. facing 20.

Small fruits in garden, 55.

Snakeroot, white, 153.

Snapdragons blooming, 154, 167.

216

Snow, beauty of, 10.

Soil, getting into early, 45.

Sowing seeds in February, 26.

Spirxa arguta, blooming, 66, 81;
Henryi, 84; Van Houttet, 83;
summer-blooming, 119.

Spirxa Filipendula, 135.

Spraying, beginning, 34; care
required, 36, 79; for codlin-
moth, 77; of sycamore, 53.

Spray, lime-sulphur, 35.

Spring, first signs of, 27, 44.

Stokesia cyanea, 100.

Strawberries blooming, 82; in
September, 150; June high-
point, 87; Progressive,151, 168;
wild, as weed, 181.

Styrax japonica blooming, 102.

Summer heliotrope discussed, 136.

Sundial, covering, 201.

Sweet Peas blooming, 119; early
sowing, 57; training, 58.

Sweet William blooming, 98; nat-
uralized, 182.

Sycamore in snow, 11; dllus. fac. 1.

Syringa pinnatifolia, 63.

Tillage, importance of, 145.

Tobacco, sweet, 183.

Tomato plants, early, 47.

Transplanting at any time, 51;
method of, 76.

Trash fire condemned, 31.

Tree-doctoring, 52; illus. fac. 53.

Trellis for fruits, 59.

Trillium grandiflorum, 15.

Tulips, 85, 191, 192.

INDEX

Valerian blooming, 100.

Vegetable-garden, illus.
109, 168, 169.

Vegetables, as gifts, 109; canning
in the home, 171; experimen-
tal, 85; for decoration, 106; in
July, 109; in November, 188;
need for preserving, 170; pleas-
ing appearance, 142; protected,
202; specializing in, 111; suc-
cession, 144.

Verbenas persisting, 166.

Vetch as green manure, 34.

Yinca minor on stone steps, 79.

Violet, blue, 180; English sweet,
44, 180.

Vistas planned, 38.

facing

Walks, laying out, 200.

Wallflowers, 166, 198.

Wall, garden, 192.

Water-garden, 208.

Watering devices, 171.

Weed, definition of, 175.

Weeds in lawn, 179.

Wild flowers, collecting, 70; de-
stroyed, 174; in May, 69.

Wilson, E. H., mentioned, 61, 131.

Winter color, planting for, 41.

Wintzer, Antoine, mentioned, 168.

Yew, American, 75.

Zinnias, giant, 139, 156, 185;
allus. in color facing 156.

Zinnia Haageana, blooming, 139,
156.

Printed in the United States of America.

HE following pages contain advertisements of a

few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

GETTING ACQUAINTED
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