90 VARIETY IN THE LITTLE GARDEN 



and celestial — is an escape, for those who will believe it, into 

 another world more real than this one. The earth itself be- 

 comes unearthly in its own flowers." 



"Unearthly beauty" — what a phrase! and how one sees it 

 in this mountain region, in the March sunsets, when through 

 the bare woods the spring sun goes down all rosy behind the 

 blue mountains, but not before it dyes the shining river below 

 with its own rose. Not Japan, not Fuji, the sacred mountain, 

 can show a greater loveliness than these mountains of Tennessee. 

 Here form is gloriously bold, atmosphere clothes all with its 

 varying beauty. Here in March that sense of things about-to-be 

 strikes one to the heart. Forsythia blooms on the lawns; Japa- 

 nese quinces are bright; peaches and apricots — perhaps 

 isolated, marking old sites of cabins or of houses — are in full 

 flower; Lonicera fragrans with its lovely earliest creamy blossom 

 is past, and here and there a domesticated Japanese cherry 

 gives its own charm. To have on such a day gifts of flowers, too, 

 seems to complete the lovely pattern — a long box with great 

 daffodils at one end, their stems covered by no less than nine 

 gracefully tied bunches of fragrant violets; a low round pan of 

 moss-edged arbutus from the mountain-side — these make memo- 

 rable a day in late March. 



Piggot, in the charming book mentioned, speaks of the devo- 

 tion of the Japanese to buds. Flowering trees and shrubs are 

 despoiled of their branches in earliest spring till the onlooker 

 begins to feel concern for next year's harvest of flowers. "None 

 of the many sights on the streets which strike strange eyes as 

 eccentric is so strange as to see people carrying home, with a 

 tender care bred of admiration, big bunches of bare twigs, with 

 perhaps not more than two or three half -open blossoms." 



But spring, shrubs, Japan — these three words carry with 

 them the sense of our flowery debt to the Flowery Kingdom, 



