MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 23 
ference our heart warms for them in proportion as the earth cools. As 
soon as the frost comes we make every effort to transfer the garden to the 
house, and put our vines and plants inside our home windows instead of 
outside. In this way we keep the summer, or a Pioneers bit of it, always 
in sight, and bid defiance to the snow storms. 
To supply this boundless need and to gratify this universal love for flow- 
ers, jt 
God has Covered the whole Earth with them. 
: 
Flowers grow everywhere. There is no soil too rich nor too poor for 
them. What traveler ever found a flowerless country? If we visit Italy, 
Egypt, Syria and Greece, the people seem foreign and strange, but many of 
the flowers are familiar like those we have seen all ourlives at home. The 
lilies of Palestine wear the same soft and brilliant costume they did when 
Christ was there and preached about them, the same they do here in Amer- 
ica; the pansies of France and England turn on us the same pensive faces 
that are seen in our own gardens. The 
‘Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,”’ 
of Burns, and which Woodworth called ‘‘the poet’s darling,” and which 
seemed to him whenever he met it ‘‘like a pleasant thought,”—the daisy 
has come over with the emigrant to live in this land. The poet I have 
mentioned greets the daisy by exclaiming 
‘** Bright flower ! whose home is everywhere !”’ 
The almost human qualities of flowers are manifested therefore in the 
fact that they can adapt themselves so easily to different places and cli- 
mates and modes of culture. The fringed gentian that seems in our fields 
to have borrowed its blue from the sky, colors the sides of the Alps, and 
the morning glory, that greets the early sun at our windows, climbs to the 
roofs of Swiss and German cottages. Hence, go where we will, in wood 
or field, in our own or in foreign lands; wander where we may, in valleys 
or on mountain tops, we shall meet the smiling ‘faces of flowers. The 
Scotch hills may be too barren for trees, too barren for human life, but 
they are never too barren for the purple heather, whose bloom turns the 
brown rock into a garden. Climb Mount Blanc, ascend where the woods 
dwindle to scattered shrubs, even higher, to where lichens and mosses 
and rocks have undisputed dominion, higher still, to where the sterile 
ground is belted by perpetual snow and ice, and here as the last sign of 
life, as the lingering symbol of the great summer world below, clinging to 
its forlorn patches of soil, you shall find flowers. If ever the North Pole 
is reached, it will be found, I think, with a crown of flowers on it. 
So, as God has given to all a love for flowers, he has made their enjoy- 
ment und cutivation possible to all. 
There is hardly any condition in life we can imagine which denies to one 
the possession and even the cultivation of a few flowers. Does one live 
in a city where houses are crowded so thickly together that there is no 
room for a garden, nor even a foot of front yard? Let him fill his win- 
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