334 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



does not enter into league with mischievous mortals and play me 

 April fool! 



The lesson drawn from this little experience is this: if you want 

 your callas to blossom in summer, let them rest in winter. Do not 

 freeze them as I did mine, lest your experiment result more disas- 

 trously, but try some more humane plan. I say humane, for I 

 cannot quite get rid of the notion that plants are sentient beings, 

 and can be hurt and wronged by our cruelty and neglect, just as 

 human things are. This notion may be somewhat more fanciful 

 and poetical than practical; but when a young girl once said to me, 

 4 'I don't like wax flowers, they hav'nt any soul," I understood per- 

 fectly what she meant. He who lives in growing sympathy with 

 nature, feels year by year a diviner kinship with the trees and 

 flowens, and all the revelations of life above him and below him. 

 No wonder the royal lover of the orient believed that the soul of 

 his dead mistress blossomed again for him in the white lily, or that 

 the poet king made the church say of her absent beloved, " He 

 feedeth among the lilies." Many a lesser soul since then has 

 cried out in substance if not in words: 



O buds, fold over and over 



Your secret so old and so new; 

 'Tis^i sense that the soul can discover 



The same both in me and in you. 



O mosses, cling closer and kinder 



By ways of the wood and the wind ; 

 Your lesson is faith to the finder 



And sight to the blind. 



O life, you may sweetly dissemble 



And hide in the fruit of the vine; 

 My lips shall yet taste you and tremble 



And aaswer the mystical sign. 



No one who does not get some glimpses of the other side of 

 things, can comprehend the higher meanings of the " things that 

 are seen." To the true lover of the flowers, the pansy, the rose, 

 the lily, is something more than a thing or even a flower; it is a 

 divine revelation of the beauty that most of us believe to be im- 

 mortal and eternal. Is it any wonder that through the influence of 

 flowers, hard hearts have grown tender and gentle, dark lives, fair 



