70 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



How often has it been said to me, '* Oh, what a garden is 

 yours for Roses ! We have a few nice flowers, but of course 

 we can't compete with you. Old Mr Drone, our gardener, 

 tells us that he never saw such a soil as yours, nor so bad a 

 soil as ours, for Roses." And herein is a fact in horticulture 

 — Mr Drone always has a bad soil. An inferior gardener, 

 whether his inferiority is caused by want of knowledge or 

 want of industry (the latter as a rule), is always snarling at 

 his soil. Whatever fails, flowers, fruits, or vegetables, 

 shrubs or trees, the fault rests ever with the soil. Hearing 

 some of these malcontents declaim, you would almost con- 

 clude that a tree, planted over night, would be discovered 

 next morning prostrate over the wall upon its back, elimi- 

 nated by the soil in disgust. Only by superhuman efibrts, 

 they will assure you, combined with extraordinary talent, 

 can anything be induced to grow but weeds. The place 

 might be, like Hood's Haunted House, 



* ' Under some prodigious ban 

 Of excommunication " — 



a place from which Jupiter had warned Phoebus and 

 Zephyrus, and Pomona and Flora, on pain of hot thunder- 

 bolts. They come there, of course, from a spirit of dis- 

 obedience, but only on the sly, and seldom. The old, old 



