108 ANNUAL REPORT. 
THURSDAY EVENING. 
Paper by Miss Hortense Share, Rosemont: 
OUTDOOR AND INDOOR CULTURE OF FLOWERS. 
The most humble home may be brightened and its coarse surroundings made 
attractive by flowers. A neatly kept border, or a bed gay with blossoms, of 
even the commonest varieties; vines over the doors, and draping the windows, 
shutting out the heat and glare of the sun, yet admitting plenty of air and 
light, are certainly more pleasant and restful to the tired wife and mother than 
an untidy, grassless yard, with fences down, and pigs, calves and geese roam- 
ing at will, as seen so often in the country. Half the time taken to keep these 
out and from chewing the clothes hung out to dry, would be amply sufficient 
to cultivate a few flowers. 
Sometimes in driving about the country I see at the windows of the poorest 
houses a few plants. These plants carefully tended, or the small flower bed, 
may be the one bit of poetry in the hard prosaic life of the overworked mother. 
Heavens! how many such there are in Minnesota!—women whose whole life is 
an endless round of pots and kettles. 
Children are fond of flowers, always delighted to have a bed. Given a few 
seeds and a little help and encouragement, they dig and plant with awill; grow 
enthusiastic and very proud of their success. Their influence is humanizing and 
refining; a child flower-lover may be awkward and shy—coarse and rude, never. 
A home unbrightened by a flower must be a dreary place, a very Sahara to any 
one whose soul glows with a love of the beautiful in nature. 
Their cultivation is so easy; give them good soil, keep out the weeds, and 
they more than repay in beauty and fragrance the little time bestowed. It is 
healthful too. After being shut up in the house the major part of these dreadful 
winters, (28 degrees bel6w zero as I write!) one is sick and weak in the spring. 
Am glad to get out and dig in the ground all I can, which is not much at first. 
Last spring, when the plants wintered in the cellar were brought up for me, I 
looked at them and the ground to be dug. in dismay. The men were busy with 
the spring-work—not a boy about—they hate to dig flower-beds, anyway. As 
one of the hired men said, ‘‘his sisters used to make him dig their flower-beds 
and he spoiled them all he could!” 
An end must always have a beginning. So | brought out a chair, dug a 
while, then rested; took an afternoon to dig dne bed. Another to set out the 
plants, nineteen geraniums, an abutilon, lemon verbena, heliotrope, lantana, 
plumbago, larpent#, chrysanthemums, &c. Had to sit down twenty-five times 
before I got through; they were well-planted—large holes and plenty of water 
—kept the roots soaking in water while digging the holes. Everything on that 
bed flourished; the geraniums leaved out so strong even the winds could not af- 
fect them; they bloomed continuously all summer, even after hard frost. These 
same geraniums have been ‘*set out’’ for six years. They are like a good con- 
tinued story, of which you always want a little more. Between the geraniums 
