TRY-OUT NURSERY 103 



berry that ripens in the fall, and has a delicious wild strawberry flavor. 

 The crop was larger when we destroyed the June blooms. 



Here also were tested some of the seeds franked to us by our 

 Congressman each spring in fact, the collection of both flower and 

 vegetable seeds furnished free by the Government made quite a 

 garden. 



Odd hours grew into years of painstaking search before all these 

 plants had been found and named, but they finally stood on the 

 record book of the arboretum and lived out their lives in fields, woods, 

 copse, hedgerow and meadow, save when the brush fire got beyond 

 control, as it sometimes did in spite of the cedar bush beating given 

 to keep it within bounds, or the knife of the mower transferred the 

 floral harvest of bloom to the hay mow, or the cattle nipped the bud- 

 ding blossoms. 



From the green hills of Vermont, at the base of Mt. Mansfield, 

 we freighted two large boxes of trailing arbutus, with a goodly 

 quantity of the soil in which they grew. These were planted in a 

 grove of Austrian pines, protected from our roving cattle, and it 

 was always a joyous discovery to find them peeping through the late 

 spring snows. As the seckle is the generally accepted standard of 

 flavor in the pear kingdom, the arbutus, "the darling of the forest," 

 should be the standard of fragrance in the world of flowers. 



Ere the plant fever developed and before that rural instinct 

 dormant in all mankind had become a living thing, the choicest shrubs 

 meant to me only a bit of attractive color or graceful form, hence, I 

 rarely grew impatient over some city guest's patronizing and flippant 

 comment: "Yes, it's beautiful, but isn't it a lot of care?" and five 

 minutes after the remark the visitor couldn't recall any detail of that 

 which was such an expression of the Divine as to be fit to embower 

 the gates of Paradise. My frequent panacea for outraged feelings 

 was to lash the offenders unmercifully with a torrent of easily 

 acquired botanical names such as Taxodium distichum, or Bambusa 

 metake, but I soon reverted to the normal habit of calling an 

 Aralia spinosa a Hercules club or a Viburnum plicatum a Japanese 

 snowball, realizing that I had in the past been a greater ingrate and 

 a grosser culprit than my guest. 



The arboretum required careful planning, but it paid, for, aside 

 from the joy of accomplishment, it made a connecting link between 

 the house and grounds, giving an air of permanence and completeness 

 to the entire development. 



Moving Day. 



Moving day had now arrived for the farm house. "Not good 

 enough for this particular site, but very good for some other near by," 

 was the verdict of the jury, and horse, block and windlass, roller, 



