48 How to Make a Flower Garden 



Another garden enthusiast, Miss Mitford, tells us what a pleasure it is 

 "to have a flower in a friend's garden." 



Gardens conduce to friendliness in many ways, and the exchange of 

 roots, bulbs, seeds and flowers is one of them. Dear personal associations 

 are rooted to the spot where grows "a flower from a friend's garden." It 

 is as much of an event in the garden as m the social world when a new 

 acquaintance is formed, and when a fine chrysanthemum root steps from a 

 neighbour's garden into ours the campanula bells should ring for joy. We 

 are fortunate in having garden cam.paniles that fall each autumn, only 

 to rise again m the same likeness when summer comes again. Always to 

 be associated with old-fashioned roses is the friend who appeared on the 

 garden scene one October day with a bundle of plants in her arms. Like 

 a fairy godmother seemed she when the bundle disclosed an assortment of 

 roses from her own old garden, all duly labelled — damask, Scotch, 

 seven sisters (a single rose wdiich was traced back more than a century), 

 "and a George the Fourth black rose, my dear, that your uncle gave me 

 years ago." Happy is the garden that has a fairy godmother to bring it 

 gifts like those roses ! 



Happy, too, ought to be that garden of the Nova Scotian who said she 

 always meant to have thrift, honesty and abundance m her garden. Honesty 

 is not often met with m gardens now, unfortunately. It is a most inter- 

 esting thing to grow because of its beautiful oval seed-valves, made apparently 

 of mother-of-pearl, set like an eye-glass m a delicate but firm rim. From 

 the pleasure a bunch of these lustrous ornaments (one of the lovehest of 

 Nature's devices in seed-pods) gives to elderly persons it would seem that 

 it was more in favour formerly than now. 



Hardy chrysanthemums are disappearing, like honesty, from the borders, 

 discouraged, possibly, by the wonderful show-flowers of the florist. But it is 

 a pity to let them go, for they are among the truest of the hardy friends, 

 and, with Japanese anemones, keep up the cheer of the garden until winter 

 is close upon us. There are several good ones among those still available — 

 white, purest yellow, dark red, silvery pink, and all the dear little button 

 kinds, mahogany-red among them. 



There is one seemingly more precious, perhaps because elusive, that 

 used to grow along a fence on an old village street, and was the object of a 

 yearly autumn drive. The lovely flower was a loose white ball just tinged 

 with purplish pink. It vanished several years ago from that Kmderhook 



