280 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



experimenting that they grow best on the northeast side of the house. 

 Last spring — merely as an experiment — I filled my geranium bed with 

 sawdust, only partly decayed, slightly enriched with compost from the 

 stables, and the geraniums were marvels ot grace and beauty. My 

 friends would scarcely believe that they had the same varieties, mine 

 were so much more prolific and brilliant. One lady delared that she had 

 never seen such geraniums except in California. I suppose that every- 

 one knows that the best way to keep the old stocks of Geraniums is to 

 pull them up by the roots and hang them top down in the cellar. 



Floraculture has for me the same sort of fascination that painting 

 seems to possess for the artist, and the magnificent effects that can be 

 produced by massing colors and judiciously arranging the lights and 

 shadows is in itself a fine art. 



Last summer my pansy bed was the delight of all my visitors, yet I 

 only had six dozen plants, but the colors ran from dusky black to snowy 

 white. A dear old lady came one day, when we were all absent, and she 

 said afterwards, " I was sorry to have missed you, but I knelt down and 

 worshiped beside your pansy bed, and I felt that the Creator was very 

 near to me." 



My sweet peas were intensely beautilul last summer and autumn. 

 As it was my first successful year with them, I will explain how they 

 were treated. I planted them in sandy soil on the east side of the porch, 

 and literally deluged the ground with them, for I did not think they 

 would amount to anything, but they all came up quite promptly and I 

 think every one of them tnrove. As soon as they began to put forth 

 feelers I had a wire trellis made for them, and they grew to be six feet 

 high and their butterfly blossoms were beautiful beyond description. 



This theme is really inexhaustible ; your patience, probably, is not, 

 and I would not weary you. Yet, before closing, I would earnestly urge 

 every lady present to grow Annuals ; it is such a fine field in which to 

 develop health and genuine happiness. Your hands will get brown and 

 your cheeks will be tanned, but the sparkling life- tide thrilling through 

 your bodies will more than compensate such minor inconveniences. 



Engage in floriculture and the "budding spring time" will mean 

 more to you than it ever did before. The birds will speak to you in a 

 new and sweeter language and you will understand them. 



Like Maurice Thompson, ) ou will be unconsciously interpreting 

 nature's secret, and will say in his language: " The more I have studied 

 nature, the more have I become aware of God, for when we study nature 

 we study Him ; not in a materialistic or pantheistic sense, but in the 

 christian sense. The will of the universe is God's will, because God made 



