102 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



berry-bearing shrubs interspersed with a few suet decorated trees and 

 bird fonts and in this keyless and never closed bird restaurant the 

 bursts of melody were most divine. 



Yonder is a sturdy trumpet vine, holding in its python grip the 

 g marled and barnacled trunk of a dead cherry tree. Bitter- 

 sweet and clematis lock arms in the clean-leaved, white flowering 

 branches of the fringe tree, at whose base grows the silk tree, while 

 near it are the Gymnocladus or Kentucky coffee and nettle 

 trees. Backgrounding these are light green feathered larches, in 

 iront the appropriately named smoke tree, and close by the lurid 

 autumn leaved varnish tree, the Kolreuteria, and the rarely planted 

 Stuartia, the American camellia or tea plant. 



Silverthorns, hawthorns and thorn-apples a-plenty backed the 

 indigo shrub. The flowering almond, fronted by great masses of 

 garden pinks, contrasted with the glorious yellow coreopsis, while mock 

 orange, bladder nut and New Jersey teas were also in evidence. The 

 prostrate cypress and the little English yews stood side by side. Neces- 

 sarily, European yews in our young country are small it takes 

 hundreds of years to grow the mightiest and sturdiest, as exampled 

 in the eleven hundred year old yew of Ripon Abbey, the epitome of 

 strength and longevity. Ours were barely four feet high.* 

 "Till fell the frost from clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on 



man.'' 



In spite of the rare beauty of the numberless varieties of golden 

 rod that brightened field and hillside, and later the shell-like nodding 

 heads of cosmos, a true frost flower, the swirl of feathery chrysan- 

 themum, and the late bloom of wistaria and clematis Jackmanni, their 

 coming as a near winter harbinger was a cloud over our Garden 

 of Eden. 



Try-Out Nursery. 



In the vegetable garden was a try-out nursery where novelties 

 were grown. Here were new melons, black sweet corn, a new variety 

 of popcorn to gladden and shorten the long winter evenings, gourds 

 of bright color and odd form, one variety in square surface area 

 rivaling our prize pumpkin, and scores of other freaks (some of them 

 true horticultural pedants) which, though purchased with wonderful 

 promises, often failed to live up to the farmer's past stand-bys. I 

 recollect, however, some corn stalks sixteen feet high, selected from 

 the twenty-acre field, that gained honorable mention at the County 

 Fair. We grew sweet potatoes of large size but small flavor, and in 

 our own biased opinion graduated many a Nestor in the agricultural 

 world, but in time crucible tests often revealed a dunce who flunked 

 and slipped into oblivion. Among other fruits was a French straw- 



*The American sequoia outdistances by full two score centuries England's venerable 

 yew. Science states there are today living specimens of the California sequoias that were old 

 trees before the pyramids were built. 



