THE MAGIC OF FLOWERS. 209 



For all walks and driveways I bed heavily with ashes from 

 the furnace, roll till it is packed tight and cover with a thin layer 

 of crushed rock. The ashes keep white, and one can add a little 

 rock each year, thus making the cost most meager. 



On the east side of the house at the foot of the vines, I have 

 a rugosa rose hedge. It is lovely with its beautiful foliage, but I 

 would never advise planting hedging too close to the house. 



For three years this hedge sulked like a spoiled child, and 

 sulky flowers are no more to be desired than sulky people, from 

 both of which "good Lord, deliver us." 



On the eastern side of my lawn, at its farthest point, is my 

 little rose garden. The most successful are the hybrid teas. Be 

 it remembered that roses should not be put with other flowers. 

 They have the artistic temperament, and for all such we willingly 

 make apologies for bad behavior ; we also admire them most and 

 love them best. 



For my background of the rose garden, I took two discarded 

 clothes line posts, set them sixteen feet apart and united them 

 with long strips of wood. At the lumber yard I found some odd 

 wooden brackets which I painted white. At one post I planted a 

 Crimson Rambler, at the other a yellow climbing rose, and there 

 you have a pocket edition of the Parthenon — plus roses. 



On the front edge of the lot next to the road, banking the 

 archway and in clumps, I have used spirea Van Houttii and 

 Japanese purple barberry. 



I am bounded on the east by a most undesirable condition, 

 consisting of an unused lot, whose owner believes in letting 

 nature take it course. I have planted everything I could think 

 of to screen off this grass and weed grown nuisance. I have used 

 sumach, tamarix, mock orange, princess feather, flowering quince 

 and snowballs. This year I shall put in front of it all a hedge of 

 hydrangea. Do not expect that man of wrath, whether he be son, 

 father, husband or brother, to always be in the most gracious 

 mood when you ask him to assist you. Oftimes the bit of help 

 you get is under protest, but good help, with here a little and 

 there a little, will remove mountains. When it is all done the 

 chances are that the dear man will say as he looks about him with 

 all the complacency of the cat that just swallowed the canary, 

 "Ain't nature grand though?" In his more sober moments I 

 fancy he will say, "Behold it is good, we builded better than we 

 knew." If one had not one dollar to spend we could still have 

 beauty about us, with nature's bounteous gifts in the woods, by 

 stream and roadside, to be had, without money and without price. 



To oversee my own gardening has not been so much a neces- 

 sity as a pleasure. It is not my vocation, but my avocation. 

 Nowhere can earth's mortals come in so close a touch with the 

 infinite as out of doors and with a garden. "For him there is no 

 unbelief who plants a seed and waits to see it push aside the sod." 



