UNLOCKING NATURE'S SECRETS 89 



Among the tender varieties were the odd little cigar plant, set 

 near a bed of sensitive plants that shrank into themselves at the slight- 

 est touch, and next to it a bed of ice plants glittered in the sunlight. 



Yellow-gemmed moneywort gave us a full money's worth of 

 compact bloom for an eighth of a mile in the spaces between 

 plants in the arboretum, but after a couple of years the irksome and 

 back-breaking task of separating weed and moneywort ended this 

 dream of a golden carpet beneath the shrubbery. 



Royal Pedigree of the Fields. 



The arboretum had a wide gamut, native shrub often side by side 

 with the rarest products of China and Japan, and, as the despised 

 and down-trodden delicately laced wild carrot outshines in beauty 

 some plant of extended pedigree, so the brilliant scarlet berries of the 

 black alder, the intense orange tuft of the milkweed (that variety 

 seen far afield) ; the feathery, curled wild clematis, the clambering, 

 orange-fruited bitter sweet, and that glorious red dart of the fireweed 

 shamed into mediocrity plants whose lineage is traced through a 

 hundred propagating houses. 



In our collection were the hobble bush, Scotch broom, wayfaring 

 tree, the withe-rod, the hazel bush, whose branches the well digger 

 believes weirdly disclose hidden waterways, and a clump of flowering 

 raspberries, shading a patch of winterberries. 



Stroll Path. 



Amid the dense growth backgrounding the arboretum was laid 

 out a stroll-path a half mile in length, completely hidden from the 

 drive by the entourage of blossom and foliage. Rustic seats, generally 

 a simple log, were set in bosky cover in this greenery retreat of the 

 birds, and here one learned a few of their many secrets. 



Unlocking Nature's Secrets. 



It was once my good fortune to spend a day with our State micro- 

 biologist. We roamed through fields, woods and fruit orchards, 

 on our way stepping into a vegetable cellar. It took a full half 

 hour to drag my friend out again to the daylight, away from cobweb, 

 cocoon, dust-covered beam and wall, to me dank nothings; to him 

 another world. Then came a rarely instructive walk of barely half 

 a mile but lasting long past dinner time. Keenly interesting was this 

 opening of nature's storehouse by one who holds a key. Discoveries 

 everywhere ! The gray bunched elongation of a grass spear, a cocoon, 

 a slight increase in the thickness of an apple twig, another snugly 

 clinging to the bark; the curled leaf "some happy creature's palace"; 

 a bruised twig; a broken limb; a trampled bit of grass; a footprint 

 in the soft mud at the edge of the brook ; a twitter in yonder copse ; 

 a bursting song of divine melody from the topmost twig of a black 

 walnut ; a whirr as of flapping wings ; the buzz of insects a thousand 



