Massachusetts Audubon Society 5 



Very diflferent from this is the cypress spurge which once was planted 

 by New England grandmothers as a garden plant, one wonders why, for it 

 is insignificant, lacks beauty and with its sticky, milky juice would hardly 

 be of use in a bouquet. Its blooms are strangely shaped and the grand- 

 mothers knew it as ''Love-in-a-huddle" and "Seven Sisters." Certainly its 

 plants huddle together and, propagating by short root stocks, it takes up 

 all ground as it goes. I know fields where it has crowded out grass and all 

 plants, resolutely marking the site of the old-time dooryard, though no 

 other sign remains. 



As persistent as this plant, but less noticeable, is the old-fashioned 

 moneywort, with its round green leaves pressed flat to earth and its little 

 gold coins of bloom. Moneywort climbs lovingly along any plot of 

 earth where once it was planted. Neither scythe nor lawn mower can 

 eradicate it, nor can close-growing turf or shade crowd it out. It is 

 no wanderer. I do not find it in plots where it was not planted. It 

 should not be classed among the "garden escapes" for it has never escaped. 

 It is the garden that has gone^ leaving it behind. Not even the lilac is 

 a surer indicator of an ancient garden plot than is the shyly hiding, per- 

 sistent golden-blooming moneywort. 



Once, walking in February over land that had been a century before 

 part of an ancient New England garden, my foot crushed through "cat-ice" 

 where a snowdrift had almost melted away. 



Looking down in the space thus opened, I saw a little plant in 

 bloom, holding up small pansy faces that nodded roguishly in the keen 

 winter air. There was a hardy marker of old-time garden spots that all 

 the world loves today for its cheery bloom, the Ladies' Delights. The 

 warmth of the earth beneath the sheltering snow-drift had so thrilled 

 the heart of this cheery flower that it had bloomed in the very middle of 

 a New England winter. I fancy the Ladies' Delights to be the best loved 

 of all the favorites of the old colonial gardens. One might guess it by 

 their various nick-names of which Ladies' Delights is one. In the South 

 they are "Johnny-Jmnp-ups," and elsewhere. Birds-eye, Garden-gates, 

 None-so-pretty, Kitty-come, Kit-run-about, Three-faces-under-a-hood, Kiss- 

 me, Tickle-my-fancy, Kiss-me-ere-I-rise, Jump-up-and-kiss-me, and these 

 flowers have one other name — the longest name probably ever given a 

 flower in the English language — Meet-her-in-the-entry-kiss-her-in-the-buttery. 



As might be inferred from all these fit names, the tiny pansies are 

 among the best loved of old English garden flowers, for like the lilac the 

 Ladies' Delights were brought here from England by loving hands in the 

 early years of the Colonies that they might be loved in American gardens 

 as they were loved in English gardens of old and are still loved today. 

 Not all old garden sites are marked by these flowers. They are cheery, 

 hardy, irrepressible, where they wish to be so. If they love a spot they 

 will stay with it and blossom there all summer long and half the winter, 

 if sheltering snows favor them. If they do not love it they move on, with 

 uncanny prescience, to some place that they can love. They are at once 

 persistent stayers and persistent wanderers. Wherever they are their joyous, 

 piquant faces are rightly what their usual name calls them, Ladies' De- 

 lights. Through them we pass from the list of flowers that sturdily stand 

 by the old garden-sites where they were first planted, to those other rightly 

 named "garden escapes" that roam the earth untrammelled and fancy 

 free, like the Bouncing Bet and the Butter- and-eggs. Theirs is another story. 



