VARIETY IN TREES 105 



into the air, \^'ith the newer leaves still holding to the topmost 

 branches, leaves pure silver too, all floating against a sky of 

 Italian blue. As the wind bends and blows these white leaves 

 against those blue deeps of heaven, I have in an inland village 

 a vision of the sea, of ships. Coming figuratively and literally 

 to earth, however, the traveling roots of the Carolina poplar 

 almost offset its misty beauty for landscape effect. They are 

 undeniably diflBcult to deal with. 



My window, a leaded casement window, has now been for a 

 week two panels of golden leaves. Fifty feet away .are hard 

 maples, and the glow of them this autumn has been particularly 

 rich and deep. Now they are thinning; more stems appear, like 

 lines of some dark fountain; the apiber of the foliage has a 

 browner tone. But as this change takes place, a change that 

 dims, that saddens a little, another and brighter change is 

 coming in the earth below — for to that we are this week con- 

 signing many treasures in bulbs, and the soil below leafless 

 quince-bushes begins to radiate all the color of the spring. The 

 large pale bulbs of the hyacinth King of the Yellows, as they lie 

 on well- worked purple ground, what a vision they give of march- 

 ing squads of creamy-yellow flowers, in type much like the 

 wooden soldiers of the Chauve Souris. Those iridescent purple 

 bulbs of the hyacinths King of the Blues and Enchantress — 

 each one is a prison of such lavenders and violets that the color 

 seems to burst through the onion-like smoothness of the bulbs' 

 own coverings. 



It is this marvelous, this constant replacement of delight, of 

 fresh idea and plan, which, whether we see it or not, is going on 

 all about us as we garden — it is the recognition of this that 

 changes all gardening from prose into poetry, from work into 

 a song. The wonder of this, that as the leaves of maple take a 



