A SIMPLE ROSE GARDEN 119 



ing health-food epidemic, in order that you may plunder 

 the housekeeping purse successfully. 



But this is the time and hour that one gardener, on a 

 very modest scale, may be excused if she overrates the 

 charms of rose possessing, for it is a June morning, both 

 bright and overcast by turns. A wood thrush is prac- 

 tising his arpegios in the little cedar copse on one side, 

 and a catbird is hurling every sort of vocal challenge 

 and bedevilment from his ancestral syringa bush on 

 the other, and all between is a gap filled with a vista 

 of rose-bushes not marshalled in a garden together, 

 but scattered here, there, and everywhere that a good 

 exposure and deep foothold could be found. 



As far as the arrangement of my roses is concerned, 

 "do as I say, not as I do" is a most convenient motto. 

 I have tried to formalize my roses these ten years past, 

 but how can I, for my yellow brier (Harrison's) has 

 followed its own sweet will so long that it makes almost 

 a hedge. The Madame Plantiers of mother's garden 

 are stalwart shrubs, like many other nameless bushes 

 collected from old gardens hereabout, one declining 

 so persistently to be uprooted from a particularly cheer- 

 ful comer that it finds itself in the modern company of 

 Japanese iris, and inadvertently sheds its petals to 

 make rose-water of the birds' bath. 



